Archive for the ‘War’ Category

There’s nothing more annoying than the dishonest spectacle that has become of our traditional State of the Union address. President Obama will address Congress, and with it, the nation, and he will lie unconditionally and remorselessly. He will tell us how we’re creating jobs, but that we can do more. He will talk about the gap increasing between the rich and the poor, never telling you that it is his policies that are expanding the gap, while adding many more people to the poverty category. He will almost certainly discuss green energy, but he will not mention how he has used crony capitalism in that field to rob the American people. What he probably will not mention is “Obama-care,” at least by that name. He may reference the Affordable Care Act and promise that things will get better for the disastrous program. Whatever he says, it is likely to be a lie, in part or in whole, because he can’t very well go before the Congress and the American people and speak the truth about either his aims or the true State of the Union. Let us speak the truth.

As we have witnessed, there are now fewer Americans working than at any time since the Carter administration, and there are more people receiving government subsidies than ever before. To the degree Wall Street has been doing well, it is only because the Federal Reserve has been pumping funny-money into the economy through Wall Street. Government debt is growing at a phenomenal rate, unsustainable by any rational measure, and none of his so-called “stimulus” has born any fruit for the general economy, no matter how much his cronies on Wall Street and K Street may have benefited.

Our defenses haven’t been in such sorry shape since Carter, and our foreign policy is a mess. Iran will have nuclear weapons, because Obama won’t do a thing to intervene. At virtually every opportunity, this president can be seen to support the enemies of the United States while often snubbing long-time allies. On the home-front, he continues to use the intelligence apparatus of the US against the American people. Indeed, he is turning the entirety of the Federal Government into his own political police force even as his purge of senior military officers continues unabated.

He is stripping us of our defenses in a violent world, while advancing the cause of despotism at home. If you happen to publish anything even vaguely disagreeable, you can expect some arm of the Federal Government to pay you a visit, or otherwise persecute and prosecute you on any trumped-up charge. Obama is converting the United States into a police-state, in which government has unlimited discretion but individuals have none.

“Vengeance is mine!” sayeth Obama. He is pursuing revenge against the free market, political enemies, the rights of citizens and anybody else he believes must be punished. Most of all, this means America as we have known it is under constant attack; the virtues that had begotten its prosperity are being stripped away. The larger body of the American people feel set-upon, and they are under the gun. Every virtue they had practiced in pursuit of their happiness is being punished.

Expect the President to tell us again that if Congress will not act, he has a phone and a pen, with which he will bring down further terror against the American people. Will you have health insurance within the span of another year? Wonder. Worry. Watch and see. Will you be able to keep any of your earnings by the time he is through? What will they be worth once he finishes inflating the money supply? Will you be permitted to speak your mind? Will you be permitted to keep (never mind ‘bear’) arms in your own defense? Will you be secure in your person against unreasonable searches and seizures? Will you be immune from indefinite imprisonment? What measure of your liberties will he leave unmolested?

Now we prepare to listen to the dictator lay down the law, as if that had been his constitutional function all along. His stooges and henchmen go out into the press and broadcast that now is the time for “action” and “direct action” and “real action.” When you hear or read this, what you’re really witnessing is leftist code for mob violence. Obama is losing his grip on the hearts of Americans charitable enough to have given him a chance. He has capitalized on this tendency of Americans, but their patience has worn thin in most quarters. His enchanting sing-song of 2008 no longer “plays in Peoria.” As things stand, he certainly won’t gain control of the House and could still lose the Senate in November, but he does not wish to be obstructed. Obama is carrying out a coup d’etat and the media won’t tell you much about it, because they’re largely complicit, if not directly assisting in bringing it to fruition.

Now is the time when the left will act to consolidate its power, and to cement the “fundamental transformation” of America they had promised, and this means making certain it can never be undone. Prepare yourselves, Americans, for the tyrant-king has set the stage, but up until now it’s been a warm-up act. He knew he couldn’t complete his mission in four years, but with a second term and three years remaining, now he can afford to take more dramatic steps. Do not be astonished by what you hear tonight, if watch this spectacle you must, but instead watch for the unspoken words behind the sentiments that will herald the beginning of the end of the republic.

I’ve remained still these last weeks waiting to see the outcome of things in my own world. My wife suffered a heart attack in early December, and while she survived and is on the mend, it put me into a pensive mood during which I’ve said little while simply absorbing what’s going on in the world around us. I don’t have all of the answers, but what I do know is that we have a choice to make. It struck me with a certain clarity when I realized that for all the efforts of good and conscientious conservatives, we’re barely making a dent. The American people are thoroughly dispirited in a way not seen since Carter, and maybe even the pre-war era of FDR’s long and loathsome administration. Nothing is improving. Jobs are scarce. The printed currency is piling up, and with it a stack of IOUs that would reach from Earth to the no-longer-planet Pluto. What strikes me most is the unwillingness to choose, perhaps because all of the options seem so depressingly bad. We are now at a stage in our civilization’s collapse that we must fight, reform, or surrender. Make no mistake about it, as while we defer the choice, the available options only become more severe in their fullest meanings. In time, the choice will be taken from us, and surrender will be replaced by slavery, whether we’d choose it or not. Even now, the embrace of the police state is transforming from a gentle, confidence-instilling hug into a death-grip from which it seems there may be no escape.

Maybe it’s time you had that blunt bit of talk with loved-ones who may not realize what’s afoot. I know I’ve tried. Some never listen because it’s too painful. More often, because it is a complicated problem with implications that will reach into every life, most refuse to consider it. Our nation is well on its way to becoming Rome. We witness now the harbingers of our moral collapse, with an unconscionable display of motherly pride in a son who literally prostituted himself to homosexual pornography to support her household. Lot’s wife had at least the advantage of a husband who would tell her to avert her eyes. This scandalous decline in our cultural moral standards has left us with a nation that is rudderless not only in Washington DC, but in Everytown, USA, where plain, ordinary citizens no longer seem to muster much moral indignation about anything of consequence, while others rush to uphold the vile, the obnoxious, and the nonsensical.

Don’t misunderstand me: There are still many Americans who feel as I do, and you may well be among them, yet we are a declining proportion of a population overwhelmingly beset with endless distractions that will mean nothing when they find themselves at some future date languishing in the gutter. I don’t believe it must end this way, but if we don’t choose another course, and soon, it will end this way. As one friend constantly reminds me, “nothing ends well or it would never end.” There’s a certain pragmatism to that view against which I would like to rebel, but like most of my readers, I feel the crushing weight of history pressing down upon us.

Will we fight? Will a beleaguered people take up arms? Many an American has made oaths, not all of them idle, about the nature of how they will go down, but I wonder if when faced with it, how many will simply fold. More, one could wonder if this is not precisely what certain statist elements are attempting to provoke. Against the combined forces of the modern government, who could long endure? Who would desire this sort of outcome? Who would want a fractured nation consumed by civil war? Still, if it became the only viable option for our survival, I wonder how many would stand and fight, and for what they’d be fighting.

Will we surrender? Will we yield to the historic march of statism, giving up first the last measures of our personal sovereignty; our property, such slim wealth as we may have managed to preserve, and all personal discretion to a police state that will command our every action, and make our every choice? The evidence today would suggest that this shall be our path. Despite its clear predatory aims against our liberties, observe the fact that at least one-third of Americans still believe the failed roll-out of the monstrous “Obama-care” should continue. Such people do not deserve freedom, and will not long cling to it, precisely because such measures of freedom they tend to demand are merely vestiges of the concept.

Will we reform? Here lies the last option for salvaging the nation, yet it is also the historically slimmest probability. The singular advantage we may possess when compared to all the collapsing civilizations that have before us descended into ash is that our basic law has been so difficult to amend that it has succeeded only twenty-seven times in more than two-hundred years. What this means is that some vital portions have been left intact, leaving to us an escape-clause of sorts, and a method by which to reach from the grave’s brink at the last moment to reform our dying civilization. This makes us undeniably unique with respect to opportunity, but the question remains as to whether we can summon the character in sufficient numbers to reach for that constitutional kill-switch.

I have become convinced that while we may tinker around with this office or that, and while we may occasionally elect a competent, sincere conservative, the federal authorities in Washington rule almost without respect to our laws, never mind our wishes. Mark Levin has stated often and with growing impatience that we will almost certainly fail to reform by focusing on the federal government and its elected office-holders. We must reach into the constitutional tool-kit and utilize its most powerful weapon against the centralization of power in Washington DC: Article V. holds the entire mechanism for reforms we seek. It is not an easy road, and there will be no instant gratification, but if we are to overcome the gaping maw of the all-powerful government now consuming us, it is upon the authority of Article V that our salvation may rest. If you’ve not yet read The Liberty Amendments, I would urge you to consider picking up a copy soon.

Even now, we can observe the Obama administration’s predatory, despotic intentions. While a review board declared that the NSA’s spying on US citizens should cease, the Obama administration rejected the board’s conclusions. While we watch, the Obama administration makes it plain that they are checking their enemies list and checking it twice, and the only way to escape it is to be perpetually nice to the administration and its aims. No dissent of any sort will be tolerated, whether you’re Dinesh D’Souza or a Tea Party activist. Worse, the Republicans on Capitol Hill are joining in, with Mitch McConnell saying the Tea Party needs a punch in the nose. There is really no longer any question about it: The war on the American people, their culture, their traditions, and their dreams is in full force, never mind the complete destruction of any prosperity they had once known. There is no accident in it, and it’s all going according to plan. My question for you remains: Will we submit to this historic script, with our part as helpless victims played to the hilt?

It’s time for us to consider whether we will be led down that same old path. We’re barely more than nine months from the mid-terms, and the evidence is that we are yielding momentum as the Republicans in Washington DC continue to throttle our efforts. One might wonder how this can be, but I understand it: We are exhausted, our morale has taken a beating, and more and more of us find we’re under an economic strain that makes other efforts seem too tiring. Some of us have noticed the expanding police state, deciding it best to lie low and to refrain from open activism. Myself, I feel as though I must now get all of my personal effects in order, in the manner of a soldier preparing for a deployment to war. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s merely my perception, but something tells me I’m not alone.

Like any other movement, it’s time to assess our position, our options, and our next move. Waiting for the “Republicans” to save us clearly won’t yield any fruit, so we must ask whether we now huddle in darkness waiting for the end, or instead rise in some fashion. I credit Mark Levin for reminding us of the one way out of all of this that remains, but now the challenge is before us: We have a choice, and we’d best make it before it’s made for us.

Most Americans are too charitably naive to recognize his actions as anything more than business-as-usual, dirty politics, but what this President is doing goes far beyond anything this country has seen previously, exceeding even the thuggery that was rampant under Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt had the good sense to avoid directly “flipping the bird” at the American people, however, even if that was the net effect of his policies. He certainly wasn’t bold enough to attack American heroes, or to perversely torment the families of US service-members killed in action. FDR was too careful a politician for that, but the same cannot be said of Barack Obama. Since the beginning of the partial government shutdown, he’s been conducting a campaign of attacks against treasured American values, while inflicting maximum pain on the most vulnerable. He’s trying to provoke the American people, with one object in mind: He wants a violent reaction from the American people so he can carry out his deadly intentions. Had you wondered why DHS needed more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition? Most Americans believe he’s just another politician, but he’s nothing of the sort. The evidence lies not only in his unrepentantly communistic past, but also in the intransigence of his actions. There will be no negotiations. This is war, the American people are his enemy, and he knows it.

By all that is good on Earth, Barack Obama should not be president. He shouldn’t have been elected, and he certainly shouldn’t have been re-elected. Now that he will never face another election, he’s undertaking to destroy the country more quickly than before, and sadly, there are a few on the Republican side in Washington DC who cannot wait to help him. I address here the establishment Republicans of the sort who are trying to help Boehner sneak amnesty through while Americans are watching the shutdown fight, including former Vice Presidential candidate and general snake-in-the-grass Paul Ryan(R-WI.) He has been laboring with various Democrats to put that steaming pile of dog excrement over on us while we’re otherwise engaged. “Watch this hand…” Even at that, however, nothing compares with the provocations being thrown like satchel-charges into the American political arena by Barack Obama. His Defense Secretary, the estimable Chuck Hagel, has ordered a suspension of death benefit payments to families of soldiers killed-in-action on the ludicrous basis that benefits to families aren’t the same as benefits to soldiers.

Hagel is a piece of dirt, but he’s simply doing as Obama orders, and this incident may be the thing that lights the fire, if nothing else will. You see, in truth, service-members’ families really have no benefits that aren’t tied to and dependent upon the service-member. This last bit of dishonor has been heaped upon them by the man who claims to be their commander-in-chief, but who hasn’t even the guts to take full credit for it, instead relying on Hagel as the heavy. Don’t be fooled. This came from the top, and everything about it reeks of the fly-ridden pestilence that is Barack Obama and his inner circle of reds, pinks, and islamo-fascists. He’s doing this because he knew it would be an outrage. He’s doing this because it permits him to deliver one final abuse to the service-members’ memories, and to the families who will forever miss them. This isn’t merely petulant behavior. It’s the behavior of a bully picking a fight, because that is his ultimate aim. Already, the number of people talking about impeachment and about arresting this treasonous president has sky-rocketed, just like he planned it. Before this is over, he wants the American people to be seething with rage, and by my estimation, this incident will go a long way to achieving that end.

Early in his career as a professional Marxist agitator, one of his former Occidental College room-mates noticed that he had a particular affinity for the notion of a violent communist takeover. That’s right, Barack Obama was one of those nuts in college, and there’s really no evidence that he ever amended his beliefs. As his former room-mate points out, there is no “conversion story.” This is because Obama hasn’t converted, remaining the true-believing Marxist monster he had been trained to become by his mother and Frank Marshall Davis. This man was raised on a solid diet of anti-American sentiment, ironically rising to occupy the office of the President of the United States, abusing now the people of the country at will. He meets with his star chamber of leftists, Marxists, and garden variety statists to plot out the means by which to drive the American people to the brink of violence.

On Tuesday, he held a press briefing during which he lied endlessly, mis-characterizing virtually every point, both lying about his congressional adversaries, and his own part in the government shutdown and the debt ceiling affair. The problem is that more and more Americans are beginning to doubt his credibility, since all the evidence actually runs in the opposite direction: More and more are noticing that President Obama is lying to them. When combined with the indignities being heaped on our service-members, living and deceased, as well as their families and the millions of veterans in the country, it’s becoming clear that he’s trying to instigate a civil war, and slowly but surely, he is succeeding. This is why he permitted a pro-amnesty group of illegal immigrants and their supporters to rally on the National Mall Tuesday, while denying veterans access to the same grounds. He’s trying to provoke a violent reaction, and if he continues on this path, I fear he will get what he wants.

As it is, there already exists a movement of truckers and bikers who intend to raise a ruckus in the nation’s capital. There are purportedly hundreds of thousands involved, perhaps millions, and some have mentioned arresting members of Congress. Truth be told, I suspect they’d like to say the same of the President, but don’t dare for fear of the Secret Service. Either way, I can almost bet dollars to donuts that Obama will un-ass the White House as the bikes and trucks roll into town, perhaps going to Florida for another golf outing or off to Las Vegas despite his own cautionary note about traveling there during his first few weeks in office in early 2009. Either way, I don’t expect we’ll see much of him in DC at that time. He and his handlers would never permit him to remain in town with such “riff-raff.” Besides, if things get out-of-hand, he’ll need to be in a position to strike back. Hard.

What many Americans may be on the cusp of grasping, perhaps too late, is that Barack Obama really isn’t just another politician. He’s not Bill Clinton, and he won’t stick his moistened finger in the air to discover the direction of the political winds. He’s every bit as committed as any jihadist, and similarly convicted of his ultimate victory over the “infidels,” in this case: Americans. His inner circle is similarly fanatical, and the proof lies in the fact of these obvious attacks on American values. If he had been listening to political advisers of the typical DC variety, he would not have permitted these incidents because they’re bad politics, as demonstrated by his dramatic decline in job-approval polling numbers over the last week. The fact that he’s no longer worried enough about politics to do the politically expedient things, or at least avoid the obvious political pitfalls should demonstrate to any observer that this guy is on some kind of a count-down. He’s like the suicide-bomber holding off the cops because he’s waiting for the timer to expire and the bomb to blow. He’s hoping his non-negotiating negotiations buy him the time he needs before too many realize what he’s doing. He’s gambling that you will continue to think he’s an ordinary scum-bag politician, rather than a committed, ideology-driven suicide bomber who is about to detonate your world. You, Republicans, and not a few in the press continue to assume he’ll come around in due course, which is why he continues to throw these bones of “I’m willing to negotiate” but never does.

It’s the same tactic the jihadists used on 9/11 to immobilize the passengers on the jet-liners. Only those on Flight 93 figured it out in advance of the end, making a heroic effort to stop the hijackers. On the first three airliners, passengers knew they were being held by terrorists, but they naively thought there was a negotiation to be had. The hijackers even played upon this thinking, telling them they would return to the airport until their demands were met. They couldn’t afford their victims discovering their true aims. They knew that once the passengers discovered it was fight and perhaps die, or do nothing and surely die, there would be a battle. Only the people on Flight 93 figured it out in time to make a difference, with better information and a bit more time on their side. Obama has taken over the controls of our nation, and he doesn’t intend to negotiate about it. His impending appointment of inflation-diva Janet Yellen should demonstrate his intentions, as she will continue to devalue the dollar through inflation, on the claim that it will create jobs. The sooner more Americans begin to realize that we now have a president who is at war with the American people, the American system of government, and the greater set of ideals that is America, the sooner we can responsibly do something about it. Until then, he gets closer and closer to his target, and too many still believe some negotiation is possible. This is a president whose minions actually made 800-F(1)UCKYO the phone number for his signature program. Some of you might think it’s a clever joke in poor taste, but instead, it’s a statement of his intentions.

Will Americans learn only after he collapses the economy? Will we learn when he uses his powers to starve Americans and deny them care? Will we learn when he uses troops against Americans? Drones? What is it going to take? Even if Americans finally catch on, how will they react? Will they give him the violence he desires, as an excuse for greater violence? Will they realize that their time is running out and that he must go by legal means? The situation looks every bit as hopeless from my point of view as it must have seemed for the first passenger to realize too late as the airplane began its descent into New York twelve years ago that something was very wrong, and that it didn’t look like an approach to an airport. The problem is always the same: Our enemies know they’re at war with us, but we never seem to notice until it’s too late. Obama knows. His inner circle knows. Boehner, McConnell, and most of the Congress are oblivious to the danger. Sadly, so also are far too many passengers on our national plane. There will at long last come the refrain, probably once again too late to save us:

The message went out from the establishment intelligentsia: Link Syria to Iran and talk about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and more in Congress will buy it. John Boehner continues to “lead” House Republicans into President Obama’s pocket, as the word circulated that if a House vote on the use of force looked like a loser, they would spare Obama the embarrassment by simply tabling the matter. Why are House Republican leaders seeking to spare Barack Obama the humiliation of losing a vote on anything? If Boehner were any kind of opposition leader, he would revel in it. The plain truth of the matter is that one can imagine a vital US interest in Syria’s civil war by the most contorted linguistic machinations. We, the American people, have no interests there, and as polls reveal, we damned-well know it.

John McCain(R-AZ) can shout down detractors at town hall meetings all he likes, but simply put, the Senator is representing somebody the interests of somebody else when he advocates sending American forces to attack Syria. Karl Rove is pushing, and all the rest of the DC intelligentsia is demanding a war on Syrian dictator (until recently referred to simply as “President”) Bashar Assad. What is Assad’s grave crime? Allegedly, forces under his command employed chemical nerve agent(s) against some number of civilians, estimated by the media in the range of 1,400. Meanwhile, in the last two years, under the horrors of civil war, nearly 100,000 people have perished. The calculation in use by Washington DC is that because Assad is alleged to have crossed this “red line,” employing these weapons of mass destruction, he must be punished(and ejected or killed) while they deny being after regime change.

Civilian death is horrible, but it is also an ugly and sometimes unavoidable reality of war. The US has bombed civilians into oblivion in every war since the advent of the airplane. We excused those deaths as unavoidable “collateral damage.” I don’t believe the method much matters. This is another instance of Washington DC imposing its morality on the rest of us. In 1994 Rawanda, when an estimated one-million Tutsi were murdered by the Hutus, nobody in Washington DC batted an eye. You see, they weren’t slaughtered with chemical weapons, but in the main by Hutus wielding machetes. Once again, the Washington DC establishment is more concerned with the weapon than the fact that people died. More Americans will die prematurely as a result of Obama-care than have died in Syria as a result of chemical weapons. Can we consider Congress and the President war criminals too?If chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction, what then must we call Obama-care? It’s a legalized genocide machine, but nobody in the DC establishment seems the least bit perturbed by it.

For his part, President Obama has conducted his foreign policy like a lunatic. Since he’s a looney-tunes leftist, this isn’t much of a surprise, but what has been more maddening is the voices of establishment Republicans rushing in to support him. Most notable among these is that daft bugger with an anger-management issue from Arizona, who cannot wait to oust dictators in the Islamic world in order to replace them with even worse enemies of freedom in the form of al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups. What sort of madman would demand a replacement of a known quantity of evil with a potentially more vast one? John McCain believes apparently that any change is good change.

In fact, it seems as though McCain has been on a mission to sabotage the American people. Some will cite his status as a war hero when excusing his bizarre policy positions in favor of illegal immigration, restrictions on the Second Amendment rights of Americans, as well as the First Amendment rights against which he legislated(McCain-Feingold.) Frankly, it doesn’t much matter whether he’s incompetent or nefarious. The fact is that his open support of this President’s anti-American agenda is all that one needs to know that something is wrong with McCain. McCain was openly challenged by Arizonans at his town-hall meeting this week. Every one of his detractors appeared more sensible than did the Senator. While some think he’s senile, I think it’s worse than a touch of dementia.

The fact is that John McCain has joined the DC establishment-class at least a decade-and-one-half ago, as he sought the GOP nomination for President in 2000. His treatment of the American people is driven by apparent disdain, and his contempt for plain old American values is shocking. Why would he impel our country to intervene on behalf of rebels who are linked to the people who attacked us throughout the 1990s and particularly on 9/11/2001? There are plenty of conspiracy theories, naturally, but whatever his reasons, they simply don’t add up in the manner he’s pitching them. Of course, it’s more than John McCain.

The entire DC establishment wants this war. As our economy careens toward a cliff, and as Washington DC inflates our money while preparing to stiff us on amnesty/illegal immigration and the funding of the WMD known as Obama-care, they want us watching Syria. After all, if people in a town-hall are clobbering McCain over Syria, they’re not clobbering him over immigration or Obama-care. I’m not suggesting that Syria is entirely a distraction, except that as creatures of opportunity, the establishment doesn’t mind using it that way. Once again, however, the people who run this country are pushing an agenda the American people largely oppose. Obama-care, amnesty, and military action in Syria are all things to which the citizens of this nation currently stand opposed.

It is for this reason that Iran and its nuclear weapons have now resurfaced as an issue linked to Syrian action. Meanwhile, the people in Washington continue to angle for the creation of a vast new caliphate spanning the Islamic world, and they’re willing to use US forces as the mercenaries in that pursuit, as the Saudis and others offer to pay for the costs of removing Assad. It’s become so bizarre that McCain claimed “Allahu Akbar” means “thank God.” Literally translated as the battle-cry it has been, it means “Allah is greater[than your God.]“ For those who have bought the misplaced notion that Islam worships the same god as Christians and Jews, this might pass the sniff-test, but for those who have studied the matter, McCain’s comment reeks of a naiveté or blatant dishonesty, either of which represents a clear and present danger to our country.

We have no business in Syria, never mind assisting the radical elements there. 1,400 civilians have been killed allegedly by chemical weapons, allegedly employed by Assad, but the American people have seen no evidence. Instead, the DC establishment chatters about “intelligence briefings” as if the same people who didn’t prevent 9/11 are some sort of omniscient Oracle that knows, or that having seen such alleged intelligence, we, the American people ought simply to believe them, and accept it without further discussion. Honestly, we’ve been here before.

While Washington DC prepares for war against Assad, we should remain mindful that the government is largely in a war against us. No longer interested in serving the interests of the American people, and no longer bothered by that fact being obvious, they intend to have their war whatever we may think about it. Just like Obama-care, and exactly like amnesty. It’s all part of one war: Washington DC against us.

At Saturday’s session of the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington DC, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made some remarks, and among those that prompted the media to go berserk, she said of the potential of US involvement in that conflict that we “should let Allah sort it out.” I actually saw one site on which she was referred to as an “isolationist” for this view, but such claims are laughable given her in-depth understanding of international trade and national security. I saw another site suggesting that she didn’t know what she was talking about, or wasn’t qualified to comment. Either way, it seemed more likely that the sites and authors in question had more trouble with who said it, or how it was said, because I believe the vast majority of Americans probably side with Governor Palin on this issue. Apart from the fact that most Americans haven’t the patience for another middle-eastern military engagement with indistinct goals and a muddled mission, there are some very practical reasons why she is right about all of this. Mostly, it comes down to the fact that it’s a no-win situation for us, because while the horrors of what is going on in Syria is tragic in human terms, nothing the US can do will effect an end to the suffering, instead only adding to it with our own losses.

The reports this past week that the Assad government had crossed Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons seem not to be as certain or as specific as our engagement should require. There are reports that Sarin nerve gas had been used, and that more than one-hundred had been killed in this manner. If true, it’s an egregious and brutal use of some very insidious weaponry, but it must also be said that if killing one-hundred or more civilians by this manner is a trigger for war, why did it take so long for us to engage Saddam Hussein? In the early years of the Clinton administration, Hussein used precisely this sort of weapon on his own civilians in Southern Iraq.

Advocates of intervention in Syria claim that what we should do is enact a “no fly zone” over that country. They insist that this is as far as we need go, but there are a few problems with this thinking. Russia has recently delivered more advanced surface-to-air missile capability to Syria, meaning that our aircraft would be subject to shoot-down in a much more threatening fashion. Is all of this really worth losing our airmen and our aircraft? I don’t see a rational justification. If this were about defending the United States, our men and women will go to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of our defense, but I know few who think we ought to spend their lives frivolously or as a matter of charity, particularly in a place where we have no particular interests or friends.

Bashir Assad is a brutal dictator, but those “rebels” who face him are not much better. We have seen this scenario play out before, and we’re witnessing its aftermath in Libya and Egypt. The attack on our facilities at Benghazi was born of a similar situation, inasmuch as after we provided air cover for the “rebels” in that country, they immediately shifted gears and wanted us out as they began to build their Islamic Republic. In this sense, we have no friends at all, by any definition, so that it’s impossible to understand why we would put Americans’ lives at risk to assist any of them. In this context, it is easy to understand Governor Palin’s sentiment. We don’t have any friends there, no real national security interests, and therefore, no justification for jumping in.

At the same time, the Russians are heavily invested in Syria and the Assad regime. Iran is pledging forces to his defense. Should we really consider placing our already over-stretched forces at risk for this? Do we risk a wider war in the region if some Russian technical advisers are killed in a raid on a surface-to-air missile site? More, if al-Qaeda-connected groups were to take over Syria as they have done in Libya, what will that mean for Israel that must live under the constant threat of Syria. Which is worse for that island of liberty: A neighbor that is predictably antagonistic and dangerous, or a volatile tempest filled with elements that feel no restraint born of relations to Russia or any other major power? I’m not inclined to guess as to how the Israelis might feel about the matter, but I suspect that an al-Qaeda-driven neighborhood is not the most pleasant prospect the Israelis could imagine.

When critics of her remarks launch into their narrow-minded tirades against her alleged lack of foreign policy knowledge, or her supposed “isolationist” views, I can’t help but remember that these same critics would attack Governor Palin whatever her position had been. Instead, her remarks serve as a flashpoint not for their true policy objections, but instead for their unabashed, unremitting hatred of Sarah Palin, the person. When one carefully evaluates the facts on the ground in Syria, the hopelessness of the situation becomes evident, and the foolishness of any American engagement there becomes clear. In Syria, we have no friends, but only enemies, who hate us as much or more than they hate one another. Were we to intercede on behalf of the so-called “rebels,” were they to prevail, we would soon find ourselves under the gun to get out. Most Americans are well beyond fatigued by this procedure, as it has been the trend in all our engagements throughout the Muslim world in the last two decades, so that unless the United States or its interests come under direct threat of some sort from actors in the region, our answer should be as Governor Palin wryly noted: “Let Allah sort it out.”

In Boston, the bloody attack on the famous marathon has given residents a sample of what it must be to live in Israel on a daily basis. One dead, and one now in custody, what the two twisted, radicalized brothers Tsarnaev ought to have taught a nation is an abject lesson in the complete failure of our immigration policy. Details are still coming to light, but it is now apparent that the nineteen year-old, Dzhokhar, hospitalized in custody, is a perfect example why the entire idea of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” as currently being discussed in Washington is a complete and utter failure. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a citizen of the United States on September 11th, 2012. A mere seven months later, he conspired with his older brother Tamerlan to commit an act of terror against the nation that had adopted him with open arms. The elder bomber shouldn’t have been in this country, but thanks to an immigration system that does nothing to protect the American people from violent offenders, he remained in this country despite a conviction for domestic violence.

His mother spouted conspiracy theories, claiming her sons are innocent, but this comes from a woman who was herself convicted of stealing over $1600.00 worth of merchandise just last year. The two brothers and their sister along with their mother have been on public assistance for much of their time in the US, and this is the thanks the American people have been offered in exchange for a foolish generosity that exceeds all rational boundaries. The now-deceased elder brother, twenty-six year-old Tamerlan, was an engineering student, and with those skills, he apparently learned to build things like pressure-cooker bombs. There is no doubt that these two bear full responsibility for their crimes, but our government and its foolhardy policies are to blame for their entry and residence in the United States, using all they were given by a beneficent nation that too easily took them in.

What is wrong with a country that invites in people and permits them to re-establish their own sectarian cultures in our nation, cultures that are in direct ethical and religious conflict with our own? What is wrong with a nation that invites in people who will become killers, raised, fed, and housed by our welfare state that is so greedy to extend its reach that it will take all comers at the expense of taxpayers, and this time, at the expense of at least four lives of people who would otherwise be with us today had these two villains not been permitted the opportunity to act as predators on the streets of Boston? Schooled by you, fed by you, that vacation you couldn’t take as you were taxed to pay for their food or housing, or enjoying the fruits of scholarships and other financial aid, these two monsters were the product of an immigration system that is broken but will not be repaired by the fraud being discussed by the “gang of eight.” If there is any justice in the world, it will be that the moronic and morally bankrupt notions of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” now under discussion in our Capital will have exploded with those bombs on the street in Boston.

The members of the “Gang-of-Eight” promise there will be no welfare eligibility, but we now know that members of this family of terrorists-in-training subsisted for some time on public assistance, according to an on-air report on Foxnews. Why? The mother was convicted of $1600 theft, and she remains in the US? Why? She should have been deported immediately after conviction. ICE should have been waiting at the back of the courtroom to shove her onto a plane bound for her homeland, but that didn’t happen. Why? In 2009, Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have been deported after an arrest and conviction for domestic violence, but he was permitted to remain, according to JudicialWatch. Why? The immigration system didn’t fail them. It failed us. The welfare system didn’t fail them. It failed us. All of the stooges in Washington DC and around the country who will now assure us that immigration needs to be reformed are correct, but they are lying to the American people when they offer their prescriptions. We need to secure the border, we need to screen would-be immigrants more thoroughly, we need to monitor them at least until they become US citizens, and we must forbid them from subsisting on the benevolence of a willing welfare state for at least that long. Violations of our laws should result in immediate and irrevocable deportation, particularly crimes of violence, fraud and theft. This shouldn’t apply only to those coming from largely Muslim countries or regions, but to immigrants from every country.

We cannot afford moral agnosticism when it comes to the integration of immigrants into our society. The failure of such amoral policies are written forcefully on the pages of our newspapers and websites throughout the tragedies of the last dozen years. We mustn’t tell people that their belief in Islam disqualifies them from immigration, but we must inform them that in the United States, in our civil society, the civil law – not the religious – must dominate the interactions among all people. We have arrived at the sickening point at which we not only import terrorists, but also import people who establish their own enclaves and sub-cultures in which some will be subjected to those seeking to recruit terrorists or radicalize young people. We see this in the open, but we permit them to remain. Do we not have enough evil-doers of our own without inviting in more, funding their existences, and bearing the burdens of their crimes against us?

It is not only Islamists. From Mexico and points South, we import millions who subsist on our welfare, our health-care, and our generosity. Our courts here in Texas are filled with the cases of robbery, thuggery, mayhem, and murder committed by illegal immigrants as well as resident aliens who import with them some of the worst facets of their cultures. In some cases, illegals are turned loose for violations of law for which legal residents would be prosecuted, but that are much harder to contend with when you add in the bureaucracy of the Immigration service. Here in Texas, the number of people killed by drunk drivers who turn out to be in the country illegally is staggering, and all too often, they do not face deportation after their sentences, not because they “slip through the cracks,” but because our government refuses to do so. Let loose as a matter of policy after non-felony offenses, many escalate to more serious crimes.

Is it all Muslims? Not nearly. Is it all Mexicans? Hardly. Is it a troubling proportion? Yes. This is because under the leadership of four consecutive presidents, we have permitted the government to excise most notions of integration or assimilation from the process. Our welfare systems invites the poor but also the malevolent to arrive in huddled masses on our shores. I have listened to the purveyors of “comprehensive immigration reform” peddling their wares to the American people, but there can be no doubt that while behind their marble columns, and oaken desks, they are immune from most of the consequences, we who fund this country are the first victims of their big ideas. We mustn’t have a friendly and generous immigration system at the expense of the lives, liberties, and treasure of the American people.

As the President announced the capture of the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, touting the goodness and resolve of the American people, I couldn’t help but wonder if our policies correlate with the Presidents flowery words. It is this president, after all, who refuses to enforce our immigration laws. It is this president who issued executive orders that will be found to have made it easier for the elder Tsarnaev brother to remain in this country despite warnings from a foreign government and a domestic violence conviction in this country. It is this president whose administration now faces a lawsuit from ICE agents for being punished for doing their jobs by enforcing the immigration laws of this nation.

There was a time when the immigration policies of this country were aimed at making the country greater, but now our policy has become one that proclaims “come as you are and live like you wish, even at our expense.” There will be those who will accuse me of being anti-immigrant, but being the grandson of immigrants, and married to an immigrant myself, I dismiss such foolish claims. Instead, I assert that America must remain a nation to which immigrants may come, but we must return to a policy that is a good deal more discerning and demanding when we decide who may come and who may remain. The first evidence of one’s suitability to immigration must be a willingness to wait in line, abiding by the laws of our country, including particularly those regarding who may enter and under which conditions.

This sad incident had begun with the despicable act of terror by two young, radicalized men. These men had been here in the United States by virtue of our pity and our charity, and these among our virtues were turned against us. This is only possible because we have permitted politicians to imagine that their personal feelings of beneficence permit them the discretion to extend it endlessly at our expense, to all comers. It’s not only this incident, but all of the lesser incidents of torment and murder that are enacted by people residing illegally and legally in the United States who ought not be permitted to stay, and who should have been ejected at the first instance of entanglement with our criminal judicial systems. Hundreds of thousands of times each year, people permitted by the policies or intransigence of our government enact crimes at the expense of the American people, and the trail of dead and maimed is much longer than the media or politicians would have you know.

“Losers”

Perhaps we should adopt the standard laid forth by furious but ashamed Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two men, interviewed in Maryland Friday, where he was asked by reporters what he thought brought about the behavior of his nephews:

“Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves — these are the only reasons I can imagine.”(emphasis added)

Tsarni, paternal uncle to the two bombers, seemed to be saying that these two were unable to settle themselves, a suggestion that they had not fully assimilated into the culture of America. Tsarni professed a love for his country, and explained that he teaches his own children to love the country, in effect, seeking to make of them Americans. He clearly regards those who won’t assimilate as “losers.”

This is ultimately the problem with our immigration system: It no longer screens out the losers, and worse, now promises them unearned rewards if they can get here somehow. More, agencies do nothing whatever to monitor immigrants to see how they are progressing toward assimilation. The “Gang of Eight” Senators is going to have a harder job selling their indecent proposal on immigration, if only because this entire event highlights just how poorly the liberal ideas on immigration policy have worked. It has created a wave of crime, a bloody trail of victims, and an absurd lack of judgment with respect to those who come to or seek to remain in our country. A loose policy is not what America needs, and this incident, combined with more than two decades of tragedies borne by an irresponsible sense of benevolence on the part of politicians has created an environment in which this sort of thing may become the new normal. These villains are responsible for their own acts, but our politicians are responsible for holding the door open to all the world without judgment. They’ve let in far too many “losers,” because just like the 9/11 hijackers, these bombers were here legally. As evidenced by the decline of our civilization, we have plenty enough “losers” of our own. Thanks to the diligence of our law enforcement personnel, these two are off the streets, but sadly, due to an unjustly forgiving immigration policy, there will be more who will likely follow in their footsteps.

One of the most frustrating things revealed about American culture these days could be seen in the wake of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s move to include women in front-line combat. Media outlets immediately sought out comments particularly from women, and particularly from veterans and current service members. The responses portrayed were almost uniformly positive, but most of the responses I saw or heard in media were entirely vapid. In local media, one younger man was asked his opinion, and his response was approximately that it’s “a good thing that women will be treated equally.” Two things about this exercise are particular despicable to me, and I don’t know which is worse: The degree to which the media helps drive public opinion, or the simple fact that public opinion is so easily driven. To me, it’s obvious that far too many of our citizens no longer think before speaking, because that sort of assessment misses the entire point of military service, and the purpose of the military altogether. Simply put, service in the military isn’t at all about you.

To those who may be somewhat confused, let me preface the discussion with a few simple facts. The purpose of the military is to be the war-fighting appendage of the nation, and its role ought to be nothing more or less than to obtain victory in the missions into which the chain-of-command thrusts the services, with the goal of victory at minimal cost. Victory first, cost minimization second. Everything else the military does is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish these things, in this order. We could have a much larger military spending our entire GDP in support of it, but that would defeat the purpose of defending the country, since nobody would have the funds for any other purpose. Let us admit then that we wish to spend roughly that which it takes in blood and treasure, but no more, in defending the country and carrying out the war-fighting missions of our nation.

Naturally, a military unable to defend the country, or to obtain victory, is pointless in most respects. If the military force we fund is unable to protect the nation, one must ask: Why fund it at all? Do we like parades so well that we will support them with hundreds of billions of dollars, in perpetuity, with no hope that the force we’ve built can defend the nation and win its wars? This would be preposterous, both from an economic and a moral standpoint. Let us then admit that the first mission of the military, and the most critical end for which it is formed is to fight our battles, win our wars, and to do so while spending as little in blood and treasure as we’re reasonably able.

Having said this, let us examine the notions advanced by the vast bulk of those approving publicly the notion of women in combat as a matter of fairness and equality to women. Let it be noted at the outset that the purpose of the military is not fairness, and not some contrived notion of radical egalitarianism, but the defense of the nation, and any policy imposed on the force must meet the singular test posed by the premise that the purpose of the military is to win our wars, and to defend our country while exacting the lowest reasonable cost in lives and money.

If a policy is implemented that doesn’t serve that end, or improve that goal, we must ask why our leaders would undertake it. I would like for one military logistical analyst or one combat veteran to explain how either of the two goals explained above are augmented by including women in front-line combat. There may be a good deal of emotionally-charged political grandstanding, but the factual answer is that combat effectiveness of units will be degraded by the mass-inclusion of women in combat roles. You may not like reading these words, but they are no less true for your opposition.

Women do not meet the same rigorous physical standards as men. Don’t take it from me, but instead take it directly from the Army’s Physical Fitness Test scoring system. For the purpose of this discussion, I have built a table with data from the scoring tables available elsewhere. This table is a condensed representation of the difference in standards between male and female soldiers, aged 17-21, as currently in use by the United States Army. The Army uses three events to rate the fitness of soldiers, being the push-up, the sit-up, and the two-mile run, performed in that order by official scorekeepers. The first two events are time-limited to two minutes each. I have placed the top and bottom passing scores possible for each sex, in each event. Please direct your attention to this table:

Push-ups

Sit-ups

2-Mile Run

Repetitions

Points

Repetitions

Points

Time

Points

Male Maximum

71

100

78

100

13:00

100

Male Minimum

42

60

53

60

15:54

60

Female Maximum

42

100

78

100

15:36

100

Female Minimum

19

60

53

60

18:54

60

The entire APFT(Army Physical Fitness Test) is based on a minimum passing score of 180, and a maximum of 300 points. In the Army, this has a bearing on promotions particular from E-4 to E-5 and from E-5 to E-6. I would like readers to observe particularly the vast performance disparity in both Push-ups and the 2-Mile run. Notice that the Maximum Score for women is obtained in Push-ups at the minimum passing score for men, and that the Maximum Score in the 2-Mile Run for women is just eighteen seconds faster than the slowest time acceptable for men.

One can argue over how much these differences would matter in support units(although they could, and probably do,) but on the battlefield, and in combat units, this is an unmitigated disaster. What’s worse, the actual difference in the Push-Up event is much greater than these scores reveal, because the average woman is shorter and lighter, both qualities placing the individual at mechanical advantage in the event. A 5’10″ male weighting 170 lbs. will on average find it easier to obtain a high score in the push-up event than a 6’2″ male,perhaps slightly more muscular, but weighing 190 lbs. Due to physiological differences between men and women, these vastly differing standards describe a significant disparity in capacity. We can wonder about how much that might matter in a rear area driving a truck, but in a forward area, heaving 100-lbs 155mm artillery projectiles around, it is bound to be quite inhibiting. Climbing in and out of the foxhole, pulling oneself up over walls and barriers, or having to carry a wounded comrade would quickly expose the difference.

What one cannot seriously argue is that the average woman serving will always obtain the top scores, or that the average man serving will only obtain the bottom. This disparity describes a vast variance in capability that can be lethal on the battlefield. It is not to say that there is no variance among men, but it is to say that the difference between the average man in the force and the average woman in the force is certain to be substantial. Since the military can only make rules that ultimately describe the average, perhaps rewarding those substantially above the mean, while ejecting those well below it, we must deal with the average, but not the exceptions.

The question then becomes: What does a military combat unit gain and/or lose by including women in direct combat roles? The simple truth is that in terms of the mission, and the likely costs of achieving it, this is an equation that spells potential or even probable disaster. The notion being advanced by those who advocate the idea is that the rewards achieved are social and/or individual. It is said by some that women add something intangible to the force by virtue of their presence, that justifies the additional losses in blood and treasure that their presence will on average impose. That may seem like a nifty argument unless it’s your blood or your treasure being unnecessarily expended, in which case it’s not such a good idea after all, and all the mystical-sounding social “wisdom” loses its ephemeral sheen.

The other argument is purely individual, and it is made in terms of notions of equality of opportunity. Let me explain this in simplest terms so that the brutally thoughtless might grasp it: The Armed Services do not exist to hand out opportunities for self-actualization, career advancement, personal gratification, or anything else of the sort. One might obtain some or all of those things through military service, but at the very least, this is and ought remain a tertiary concern for the chain of command. Again, chief concerns must be mission accomplishment and minimal cost, and in that pursuit, the services ought to retain every tool of discrimination at their disposal.

Some will misunderstand my usage of “discrimination” as meaning wanton, arbitrary rejection of some people for irrational cause(s.) This is not the meaning I intend, instead applying the usage that describes making a rational choice for rational purposes in the manner one shops for automobiles or smart-phones. In this sense, we all discriminate daily, many times over, and to good effect because it generally results in improved products or services since we will tend to opt for those most likely to satisfy our purposes.

Constructing a fighting force is no different, in fact, but just as Samsung can’t sue you for discrimination because you opted for Apple’s “iPhone” instead of the former’s “Galaxy,” the military is usually immune from lawsuits by merely stating their decisions in the context of the best interests of the service involved. What so many people don’t seem to understand is that military service is not an ordinary workplace, to which one can apply at will, and resign at whim. In the civilian sector, one has every remedy under the sun available if there is irrational discrimination, but under the martial authority that is the military, and as an institution for the nation’s defense, such concepts are foreign and irrelevant.

It highlights the misunderstanding of what military service is, and isn’t. Too many people in our culture are now possessed of an entitlement mindset, a notion that they too readily apply to the most farcical situation. There is no entitlement to be an infantry soldier. You can sign up for the infantry if you like, and if the Army will let you, but if after completing your initial training, the DoD decides that for the moment, they need more cooks, you’d better prepare to learn the ins and outs of a DFAC(Dining Facility – formerly known as the Mess-hall) because irrespective of the MOS(Military Occupational Specialty) for which you enlisted, you serve the needs of the Army first – not your own.

How many very good and able persons have wanted to be pilots in the military only to be told that since their vision requires corrective lenses to be at least 20/20, they are ineligible for that role? Will the Americans With Disabilities Act now be taken to apply to military service? There are people advocating such notions already, but what mustn’t be lost in all of this is the reason the military is given extraordinary power to discriminate on the basis of factors that would not be legally acceptable or morally proper in the civilian population: The function of the military is to keep the rest of us safe.

This is why I am so thoroughly disgusted by the coverage of this change in policy given by the media. It ignores the fact that this is a politically-based decision that merits no consideration whatever in a professional military. A professional military would study, objectively – without subservience to politicians’ whims, the impact of replacing approximately half of its combat forces with the average female enlistee. It would not consider the exceptional few who would describe the upper tail of the bell-curve on physical performance, but instead the median performer. Under that scrutiny, this entire notion would be abolished in one minute, because it does not serve the interests of the mission, or the minimization of the mission’s costs in blood and treasure. Our forces must accomplish their missions with as many as possible able to come home alive and in one piece, and that should be the enduring criteria of every person charged with command over troops in combat, from Lieutenant to Commander-in-Chief.

What we must not do is to permit the armed services of the United States to be degraded further in its capabilities for the sake of contrived notions of equality that have no relevance on the battlefield. We don’t seek equality on the battlefield with our enemies, but instead seek every advantage, as they do. That’s the nature of war, where a single moment in a single battle can change the fortunes of nations, so that every advantage is precious. How many advantages do we wish to yield to our present and future enemies in pursuit of a nonsensical notion of equality? After all, the only real equality that exists on a battlefield is the one obtained in death.

Sadly, if we adopt policies that place more service-members in disadvantageous positions in combat, we will see more equality of the fatal sort too, but that must be the inevitable result when policies are not based on the realities of war, but instead on the basis of the wishes of some impractical, egg-headed “constitutional scholar” in the ivory tower at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the legion of nit-wits he has convinced to believe that military service is about them. There’s a reason it’s widely considered a “sacrifice.” Notions of equality that interfere with or hamper the military’s mission are among the things one voluntarily surrenders.

Editor’s Note: You should not be surprised that this story broke just in time for the Wednesday evening news cycle, because the whole purpose for which this story was pushed to the media at that time was clearly to remove Hillary Clinton’s wretched testimony in the Senate from the position as top story. This is naturally an important issue, but it is news only in the respect that it’s been pushed to the surface as a way to change the subject. Period. Now we’ll argue over this instead of the disgusting dishonesty of Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Obama administration.

This President possesses a peculiar penchant for knocking his own country and countrymen. In his statement during a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he explained how America had fallen short of its ideals in Afghanistan, but I wonder about the meaning and the relevance of this claim. After all, who has been at the helm of American efforts in Afghanistan (or anywhere else) these last four year? The other problem with his statement is that he references ideals. I have serious doubts that he’s acquainted with the ideals of America, as evidenced by his repeated attacks on liberty. No, when he says America has “fallen short,” what he means is that you and I have fallen short, or that our troops have fallen short, but the punishing truth is that the only manner in which the American people may have fallen short had been in missing the opportunity to eject him from office. To the degree America may have failed in its engagements anywhere around the globe, the truth is quite easy to observe: Mr. Obama, America has not fallen short. You have!

To suggest that our oft-deployed troops who spend more time in foreign pest-holes than they do at home have in any measure failed is to ignore both the scale of their mission and the limitations placed upon them by their Commander-in-Chief. In Afghanistan particularly, our troops are saddled with the grim task of pacifying a region that is inherently unsuited to that end, while looking nervously over their shoulders to see if our alleged ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ in the Afghan Army will open fire on them from behind. The Chain of Command has created rules of engagement that are so patently absurd that our soldiers must now fear both to follow them or not follow them, because to follow them can be a suicidal act, and to not follow them can result in punitive legal action against them.

Of course, before we descend even to the nuts-and-bolts of a particular policy, we must examine what Mr. Obama considers the “ideal.” For most Americans, the ideal in Afghanistan is to exterminate the terrorists, and to gain victory by totally annihilating the people who together with al Qaeda fashioned the capacity to attack the United States on 9/11, and in other places and times. That’s the American ideal. Obama’s ideal in Afghanistan is something else altogether, and it’s patently clear that it’s an end never to be achieved: To make peace with an intractable enemy whose only wish and desire is to kill us, even if they must strap bombs on their own children to do so. Obama’s notion of the ideal is in conflict with what America is and has been all through its nearly two-and-one-half centuries long history, requiring America to volunteer as a sacrificial lamb for those who want to kill it anyway.

To make friends of enemies that hate you is an impossibility. We did not seek to make friends of the Germans or the Italians or Japanese in WWII. Only after pounding them into complete submission did we seek to make peace, but even then, we did not make peace with those who had been conducting the ideology driving the conflict on their side. We merely asserted that they would now be in full compliance with our will, or we would pummel them into dust, resuming the combat against them. This is the American ideal of how a war is to be conducted, because the American ideal recognizes the sad realities of war, and the sickening aggregation of human frailties that leads inevitably to them.

Mr. Obama does not adopt the American ideal for war-making, or near as this writer can discern, much of anything else. If America has fallen short of his ideals, that may be just as well because his ideals are not attainable on this Earth. His ideals lead to the construction of walls, and the building of gulags, and to the unemployment and welfare lines. His ideals end with an unarmed citizenry unable to oppose a growing, oppressive state. Those will be your choices if you are to be governed by the ideals of Mr. Obama and his henchmen. It is not possible to attain the Utopia he has imagined in his narrow mind, but he doesn’t care how great will be the human carnage left in his wake because he sees those things as “bumps in the road,” much as Mayor Bloomberg now suggests that if his new pain medication regulations in New York cause some unnecessary pain to patients, they must simply suck it up.

Imagine living your entire life dominated by these people, who disregard the torments they inflict on your lives with a shrug. Given a chance, that will be the nature of our existence, but for our soldiers toiling away in kill-zones like Afghanistan, this is already the case. There, Obama’s ideals have obtained the condition to which we might all look forward under the next four years of his so-called “leadership.” There is death everywhere, and behind every corner lurks another killer who is sheltered by rules of engagement that permit him to slip away again, unharmed, and free to work his terror against you. Famine and human need are monumental, but no amount of distributing goods and services can satisfy the want. Afghanistan is a grim disaster in human terms, on all sides of the battle, and all is being directed and managed from the office of the “idealist” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington DC.

For the President of the United States to stand before the world and proclaim that America has “fallen short” of ideals that he has constructed within the narrow confines of his skull is not to impeach America, but instead to admit that his own ideals are unattainable on this Earth. Our soldiers have not failed this President, but he has failed them, and awfully so. Soon, this same despotic mind will tell us, the American people, how we have failed to live up to the twisted ideals with which he has been inculcated and indoctrinated by such thoroughly bent minds as those of Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis. The truth is that on our current course, America will soon resemble Afghanistan in both imitation and mockery of Obama’s bloody “ideal.”

The American people are as fallible as any other, but it takes a peculiarly wretched mind to lead us to the disasters we now endure both at home and abroad. In this moment, and in this speech lies a grave confession for all those with the courage to recognize it: Barack Obama has established a bizarre and twisted ideal that is unattainable, but he now blames America for failing to reach it. You see, in his view, the ideal is wonderful, but it is only your human failings that prevent you from meeting the challenge. As a narcissist, in his view, there is nothing wrong with the ideal to which he adheres, but only with you (and America) for failing to approach it. In his view, it is you who fail to perfect yourselves, but not his failure for expecting compliance with an ideal that would require you to drink his preferred flavor of the same deadly koolaid. This false attribution of guilt is the hallmark of statists, seeking always to blame their victims for the vast failures they have initiated. The truth is something else, and it’s simply this: Barack Obama’s vision has fallen short of America’s ideals, and the sooner we re-establish them, the sooner our long national nightmare will come to an end, because unlike his, they are attainable on this Earth.

In the aftermath of the horrifying school shooting in Newtown, it was inevitable that leftists would use the opportunity to agitate for further limitations on the right to keep and bear arms. Before the day was over, the Marxist-in-Chief appeared to make a statement to the press, a man who is himself perpetually surrounded by a legion of armed guards, and his basic premise was laid out: This has to stop and he’s going after guns to do it. This is the typical reaction to these sorts of events, just as the last “Assault Weapons Ban” was passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, in which exactly zero assault weapons were used by the bombers. This is a fraudulent approach to a problem, because it has nothing in fact to do with the issue at hand. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need assault weapons to murder Americans en masse, because the real problem is with individuals, but not with the implements. Knowing this, I have a serious question or two for politicians before they decide to infringe upon our rights. I want them to know what’s at stake, because taking such steps could do mortal damage to the country.

I’d like politicians to place themselves in law-abiding gun-owners’ shoes. Many are like me. I’m an Army veteran, and since returning to civilian life, I have never raised any of the weapons I own in the direction of another living soul. I maintain a number of firearms for defense of my home, my family, and my farm, against both human and non-human predators. Some of these would undoubtedly be classified “assault weapons” given the bizarre criteria of the last iteration of the legislation, but that hardly matters. I’m a law-abiding citizen, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would employ my guns for reckless, wanton purposes. That notion is with respect to the laws as currently written, however, new laws would leave us with a new problem should the politicians in Washington DC decide they must enact a ban on any of the weapons we already lawfully own, because if they believe that Americans are going to hand them over, they’re in for a bit of a disappointment. Why do politicians believe that law-abiding citizens should be punished for crimes they have not committed, and would never commit?

Many Americans will not yield their weapons. Will not. Got that? So, here’s the trouble: If by enacting a new law, people are made criminal by possession of weapons that had been perfectly legal, folks in Washington DC will be making a grave error in judgment. You see, I am a big believer in what I like to call “Mark’s nothing-left-to-lose” theory, which states that if you make a criminal of a person by legislative or regulatory fiat, a person who has really committed no crime and no tort, that person really has no further reason to obey any laws. Not gun laws. Not traffic laws. Not tax laws. Not drug laws. Not any law. I think there’s something tragic about the sort of thinking driving this gun-grabbing mentality in Washington DC, but I also believe it is intended to garner the worst possible result, and there are those who will cheer at the carnage that will be wrought. You see, they will claim the political shield of their alleged “good intentions,” but the truth is that they have none. They intend to wreck this Republic, and if we yield so much as an inch on this, they will have made another step in that direction.

I am certain there are those advocating such legislation who believe they’ll simply send out federal agents to collect all the guns and thereby enforce the laws, and if they have a few shoot-outs with those who may be unwilling to surrender their arms, so much the better to strengthen the propaganda case. After all, it won’t be the necks of the politicians that are on the lines, but federal agents who have been directed to enforce an immoral and reckless law. I pity them, because I know some number of them will doubtless be injured or worse, but also because I know some of them will disagree vehemently with this law, and away from work, they’ll be forced to live under it just like every other American. The rational thinkers among them might well refuse to carry such a law into execution, but sadly, the soft coercion of a paycheck is a mighty motivator.

There is also the social pressure, and it comes in the form of celebrities, media personalities and politicians making ridiculous comments about America and “its gun laws.” Take Piers Morgan, who has “threatened” self-deportation if America doesn’t change its gun laws. Apart from leftist dolts, I cannot imagine the mindset of anybody who thinks this is an effective tactic. Will anybody miss Piers Morgan? To me, this looks like an inducement to repeal some of the archaic restrictions on firearms ownership already on the books. Note to Mr. Morgan: If you’re going to “threaten” us, be sure the threatened action is something that we’d like to avoid. As it is, and as his ratings demonstrate, I think Mr. Morgan had better start packing his bags now.

I think the politicians aren’t quite seeing the whole picture in such a short-sighted view of how things under a ban-and-seizure procedure might go. It’s their operating assumption that the one-hundred million Americans who legally and safely own firearms will either hand in their guns at the appointed place and time, or if they resist, simply hunker down to await the aforementioned federal agents to show up for the obligatory stand-off and eventual surrender or massacre. The problem with this view is that I don’t think the bulk of that one-hundred million Americans who own guns are nearly so stupid or short-sighted as politicians seem to believe. The real question is whether politicians are so universally craven, and if they’re willing to convert millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals by post facto writ of law. Do they understand that for some number of Americans, this will truly amount to an act of war? Do they believe all armed citizens will simply go along quietly?

I doubt that all one-hundred million Americans are likely to be so docile, or so flat-footed. I suspect that if politicians enact such laws, or actually attempt to confiscate guns from Americans, there could be a rather different reaction based upon “Mark’s nothing-left-to-lose” hypothesis. You see, I could well imagine any number of gun owners who would look at their guns, the impending seizures, their shrinking liberties, and simply conclude that “today is the day for the second bloody revolution.” I suspect they would not be so slothful as to wait, huddling in their homes for hordes of better-armed and vastly more numerous federal agents to appear at their door. No, I believe that if such a thing were to be enacted, the bright line between liberty and tyranny will have been crossed, and at such a point, it may well become an open season, not on poor federal agents who are being directed to such idiocy, but on politicians, media, and other public persons who support such nonsense, breaching the peace with legislation, prompting American gun-owners to oppose such tyrannical actions, and to show up at their doors with notions other than peaceful discourse in mind.

Naturally, there are those leftists who actually hope such a scenario would arise, because it would permit their shill to declare martial law, and so on, but the problem comes in for all those supporters of such policies who do not have and will not have a legion of armed guards to protect them on the day Americans finally become pissed-off, or otherwise decide they have nothing left to lose. There exists a substantial number of Americans who simply will not yield to such a law. This is not Australia, and contrary to the thinking of those who may have been led to believe the same sort of approach could work in the US, whereby the government would ban guns and conducted a mass confiscation through a buyback program, most going along quietly, there are still far too many Americans who realize the simple truth that a government that would seize the weapons of law-abiding citizens is a tyrannical master, and no longer an obedient servant.

One imbecile suggesting total confiscation is the governor of New York, whose only actual claim to fame is that his father had been governor of that state, that Bill Clinton hired him for a cabinet post as a favor to his father, and he used his father’s name and connections to elevate him into high office. Andrew Cuomo called for confiscation, and here, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin discuss the matter on FoxNews:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZcUoKaN_PM]

This is a dangerous time in which we live, made all the more dangerous by the imbecilic sloganeering of politicians bent upon an agenda of destruction. Guns really aren’t the problem, and they have never been the cause or source of violence. Instead, this is a problem of mostly insane individuals who do evil deeds. It’s a problem of people who are only loosely tied to reality or morality getting their hands on guns, or bombs, or airplanes. There isn’t enough banning and seizing to be done to combat all the evil actors on the planet, which is the reason that we must retain our rights to keep and bear arms. Some of those evil actors rise to power in governments, and occasionally, they too must be confronted with arms. It would be an awful lesson to repeat, if politicians foolishly insist on replaying it here, now, in the country that had been the world’s most free and prosperous. Taking away the right to keep and bear arms in any fashion isn’t an acceptable answer for a free people, and I pray a majority of our politicians know it. It’s not a lesson a free people should be compelled to re-teach.

One story that garnered some media attention this week was a commentary written by Suzanne Venker at FoxNews. In the article entitled War on Men, Venker contends that the real war in our culture has been waged against men. Her conclusions are based on the observation that fewer and fewer men seem to have any interest in marriage, while interest among women is on the rise, but there exists a widespread lament about an alleged dearth of good men. In the end, Venker concluded that women may bear the blame for this situation, but that conclusion garnered outrage and mockery from the typical leftist outlets. At the same time, Limbaugh discussed the matter at length, but his conclusions were clearly different than those of the shrill left. What’s the truth? Is there a “war” on men? Is it being waged by women who are unknowingly setting themselves up for failure? I believe Venker is onto something, but I also think her article didn’t fully explore the ramifications, never mind all the conspirators. If real, this war has had a silent collaborator or two, and I think rather than casting most of the blame on women, she should have identified all of the culprits.

It is true to say that the character of women has fundamentally changed, and much of that was driven by the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. Women have entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers, and they are now a majority of employees across the nation. Women now dominate numerically the college campus, and in many respects, women have managed to displace men entirely. According to Venker, much of this owes to anger with men, a feeling engendered and supported by our education establishment, much of which is dominated by women. Writes Venker:

“In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.”

This may not be entirely true, but there is at least a nugget of truth in it. There is a clear hostility toward men being engendered by the culture, and I think it is safe to say that any number of men might secretly agree with this sentiment, but while Venker seems to focus on the pedestal from which men were knocked, she spends a good deal less attention on the pedestal being abandoned by women. She finally arrives at a statement that some will find offensive, but nevertheless contains a good bit of information about one of the collaborators in this war:

“It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.”

Here is where Venker both reveals an effect, but slips and falls on the cause. Spending a good deal of time researching relationships and the culture, Venker should have realized that there is some truth to that old admonishment that “men are only after one thing.” In the main, and in the short-run thinking of men, that’s probably more often true than not, so that when women climbed down off their once-lofty pedestal in favor of the lower pedestal men had always occupied, it wasn’t true that they were kicking men off, but that men went willingly, at least initially. The truth is that men hadn’t been kicked off the pedestal so much as bribed off of it. Of course, this is not all the story, but it provides some insight. When Venker says “no responsibilities whatsoever,” she is mostly correct when viewed from the short-run perspective of men, however those responsibilities would need to be fulfilled by somebody, and therein we shall find the chief collaborator.

While men were busy stepping down from the lower pedestal to which feminism had enticed women, after spending some time on that lowly perch, women were finding it wasn’t all they were promised it would be. Venker’s point has merit, but the question is: “Why would women so easily leap from the higher perch?” The roots of this phenomenon may be fundamental to our nature, and has been understood about the nature of people since the beginning of time. How close does this parallel what the Judeo-Christian ethos regards as the moment of the original sin? Genesis 3:6 relates:

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

“Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

This line of thinking then begs the question: “Who played the role of the serpent?” This is the identity of the other collaborator in the “War on men,”, and its name is government. If there is a war on men, there is no institution that has benefited more from the battle. If it is to be alleged that while Eve was beguiled by the serpent, and thus caused herself to be cast out of the garden, so it is true that men had been complicit inasmuch as they partook also of the fruit, raising no objection, but knowing the fruit would have a bitter aftertaste. Just as the serpent knew to make his case to women, so too have statists. In our modern culture, the aftertaste of this temptation is to be measured in the wreckage of families, both those dissolved and those never fully constituted, and its evidence is seen in the fundamental breakdown of our society that continues at breakneck speed. It is true that men have shirked responsibility, but the worst of it is not in their roles as fathers, so much as in their role as men altogether. You see, men didn’t fight for their pedestal because they assumed that if they yielded it, they would partake of the fruit too, and like Adam, foolishly believed they would avoid the consequences.

Now we arrive in a world in which Venker describes women as angry and resentful of men, but I can imagine Eve being resentful of Adam too, as they were cast out of the garden. “If you had known better, why didn’t you stop me?” Adam might respond in coy pragmatism: “How was I to stop you?” His unstated truth had been: “I didn’t want to…”

All of this demonstrates a strong cultural decline that evades description in modern platitudes. Instead, what drives all of this is a pervasive immorality based on the notion that one can have anything one wants instantly, without consequence or responsibility, and without regard to the costs. The provider of this temptation has been big government, and those who advance its cause. Men sought the immediate benefits of the sexual revolution without concerning themselves with some murky consequence in some distant future. That future has arrived, and if men now find they are bearing the cost, as Venker explains, women are bearing a terrible consequence:

“It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

“So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.”

I disagree with Venker inasmuch as I believe the worst victims of this entire problem are children. Men are largely absent from the lives of their children, and they’re being raised in a world that diminishes roughly half of them explicitly, but all of them in fact. We are now more than two generations into this culture of instant gratification, and yet few seem to have been gratified in the long run.

Just as there was a rush by many on the left to screech at Venker, so I expect there will be those who take a similar stance toward me, who will accuse me of some misogyny or other “primitive thinking.” Apart from the fact that I don’t care who doesn’t like it, the simple fact is that we can measure the tragedy that has arisen in an America transformed by post-modern feminism, and it’s ugly. I don’t blame women even as much as Venker, because I believe men were tempted by short-run “benefits” just as surely as Adam stood by as Eve was beguiled. Venker concludes that women can correct all of this, but I disagree:

“Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.”

“If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.”

Men cannot permit themselves to be complicit bystanders, who partake of the fruit but point back at women as the blame. Men have let their own standards slide, and until they raise them a good deal, and for longer than the short-run, it’s going to continue because women will have no cause to change. Imagine a world in which men are the ones who say “no.” Preposterous? Perhaps, but if our society is to survive, never mind return to a past “golden age,” somebody is going to have to say it, and what Venker’s article reveals is that slowly, men have begun to shift in that direction. Today, they’re saying “no” to marriage in unprecedented numbers. Where Venker sees this as a result of a war on men, I see it as a result of their moral capitulation. Far too many men have adopted the shoddy notion encapsulated in that well-worn misogynist retort: “Why buy the cow if the milk is for free?” The real question laid before men is now: Is it so free as you once thought? On that basis, women are right to ask if the contempt so many women now feel for men is so entirely undeserved as Venker’s piece suggests. If, as the Bible explains, men were to be the moral leaders, one might ask where they had been. After all, it wasn’t Eve alone who fell into temptation. If the war on men began with the serpent’s whispers in the Garden of Eden, we ought to ask why Adam surrendered so easily.

I was born in the 1960s, just as Congress and Lyndon Johnson launched a new war. The war raged on, and the amount of money spent was unprecedented. Never before had so much money been thrown at a war, but the enemy refused to relent. Money bled out of our treasury, and the futures of so many young Americans were wrecked. The cost to the nation was measured in its tragic affects on our culture, as well as our financial standing, and since that war commenced, America has never been the same. In most cases, the left can’t wait to shut down a failed war once it’s taken up by Republican Presidents, but this war was different. This was a war they would continue to wage, despite all of the evidence that they were making no ground against an intransigent and intractable enemy. Failure didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Infiltrations? No matter. Destroyed morale? Just another burden to be borne by the American people. Ladies and gentlemen, no war in history has cost so much or produced so little as the war commenced in earnest by President Johnson, and yet no war in American history has seen such a commitment of resources. Naturally, I speak not of Vietnam that ended in the 1975, but instead of the counterproductive “war on poverty” that continues to this day, with no hint of success in sight.

In the five decades of the declared “War on Poverty,” there hasn’t been a President who hasn’t spurred it along, and there hasn’t been a Congress that did not act to expand it. We have spent money in the range of some $15-20 Trillion on the various means-tested entitlement and welfare programs over that period. It’s fair to say the number is at least on par with our current national debt, and yet for all the screaming by Democrats over the cost of the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan, neither approach the colossal sum poured into the welfare systems and programs of this nation. In fact, you can combine the total of defense and war spending over that same period and not arrive at an equal sum. My question for Democrats, as well as for “compassionate conservatives” is simply this: When do you admit that this war had been a complete and utter failure, more fruitless than any you’ve enlisted our country to fight?

At this late date, we have more people in poverty, and enrolled in these poverty programs than ever before. If the purpose of these programs had been to give people a “hand up,” how long ago should we have expected them to take it? One in six Americans is receiving food-stamps. One in six! One in seven is enrolled in Medicaid. More than half the nation’s children receive free or reduced-price lunches and breakfasts at school, all funded by federal dollars. The number of people living in government-furnished or government-financed housing is outrageous. If the United States had been involved in a war stretching across the span of a half-century, yielding no improvement in the state of our security, the leftists in this nation would be terminally apoplectic. We can’t so much as deploy troops to battle terrorists without the left losing its collective hive-mind.

If one were to view warfare as an investment in the future of a county, one could justify the first Gulf War on the basis that it at least restored the free flow of oil at market prices that permitted the nation to enjoy most of a decade of relative prosperity. If you evaluate the so-called “War on Poverty” by the same criteria, a serious economist would note that it had only made the nation poorer. In real terms, we have more people in poverty, and a system that is designed to increase the number who will languish in that state. In truth, most of the people receiving the bounty of the welfare state are living as well as people who earn 150% of the poverty level, and we now provide hand-outs of every description to so many people that they have begun to outnumber producers.

If it is the standard policy of Democrats and their cohort leftist groups to abandon a failed war, why are they not protesting on the streets? Why are they not screaming and chanting and having die-ins on the streets, not wearing the garb of massacred civilians, as is their usual ploy, but instead wearing the clothing of all those who work for a living? That’s who they’re killing. The people being rewarded by this system are not the people who’ve earned it. Instead, the people who earned the bounty that is being redistributed are being victimized by the Democrats, but also by their friends who are the self-described “compassionate conservatives” in the Republican Party. Is their compassion with the money of others so thoroughly blinding that they are now unable to see what it is they have wrought? Rather than elevate people from poverty, giving them the needed “hand up,” what they have accomplished is to create a permanent underclass that largely only fits that definition to the extent of their earnings, but no longer by their standard of living.

The wretched tragedy of this failed War on Poverty might be forgiven if one were to believe it had been the accidental consequence of good intentions, but it is not. No rational person can evaluate the failed results that have characterized our national effort to reduce poverty, ten years in, twenty years in, or thirty years in, somebody ought to have recognized that this is not working. It can’t work, in fact, but if you support programs of this sort after you’ve watched their perennial failures for the span of a half-century, one can scarcely conclude that the advocates of such a system had been motivated by benevolence. While the “War on Poverty” has been a thorough failure, their other war has been a rousing success: The entirety of this system is part of the extended political warfare against the American people. The idea is to break us, and it’s working, so that at long last, they have succeeded in making us vulnerable to every conceivable threat. If the real goal isn’t to cure poverty, but instead to impoverish the American people both in material and liberty, the war of the statists against America has been a rousing success. We believed they were fighting a war on poverty, but the lengthening line of economic corpses tells another story. There will be no flag-dropped coffins in this war, and no one will salutes its victims, eventually to be measured in the tens or hundreds of millions in shattered dreams and wasted lives. Too generous and trusting to perceive the objective of their attackers, most Americans didn’t understand that all along, it had been a war for poverty.

Nearly one-hundred-fifty years ago, in central West Virginia, William “Mudwall” Jackson(cousin of famous “Stonewall” Jackson) advanced on the improvised “fort” at Bulltown. He intended to capture it, and during the fight, more than twelve hours, he twice sent surrender demands under a flag of truce to the Union garrison commander, Captain William Mattingly. Mattingly reportedly replied:

“I will fight until Hell freezes over and then fight on the ice”.

Mattingly and his men escaped and fled, but it was a tough road out of hell.

Barack Obama is having his victory speech, and he’s trying to sound magnanimous. It’s fake. He’s fake. I’m not interested in his notions of unity. He doesn’t want unity. He wants to dominate. I’m not interested in unity at the price of freedom.

That’s my message to Barack Obama, and to all of those who will be gleeful at his re-election. We’re on the ice now, and with Hell frozen over, there’s nothing better to do, and nothing that needs more doing. I am going to fight you. My message to conservatives is simple: Don’t yield, don’t surrender, and don’t give any damned ground to these ruthless, cheating Marxists. Of course, this fight is just beginning, and there’s going to be some fighting in the conservative movement, and that starts now. Right now. To every conservative, I urge you to watch closely who you choose for your candidates in the future. I wasn’t a Romney fan, but I did the only rational thing remaining and voted for him. I don’t regret that decision, but I have already noticed some glee on the part of some who wouldn’t stand and do the same. That’s fine, and you’ll have your day in the court of conservative opinion, but let me suggest to my conservative brethren that what you are about to witness is going to shock your senses and drive you to the brink.

We have people in the Republican establishment who have conspired to obtain this result. They will undoubtedly continue to conspire against us. First, they shove a moderately palatable candidate down conservatives’ throats. Next, they hand-cuff us and him with the same old mush that has landed us in this quagmire. Rather than aggressively campaign, he played it safe. On August 3rd, I wrote, in part:

“Romney is being careful, to the extent that he has begun to run what looks like an NFL “prevent defense,” intended to prevent any game-changing mistakes late in the game, but almost invariably leading to defeat by an accumulation of a series of lesser mistakes, any of which would be insignificant on their own, but that in the aggregate prove lethal.”

Ladies and gentlemen, isn’t this precisely what has happened? When Chris Christie hugged Barack Obama in the wake of Sandy, wasn’t this an unaccounted circumstance that threw a monkey-wrench in the “prevent defense” plan? How did Romney react? He did nothing. He continued to carefully plod along with no mention of Benghazi, no refutations of Obama’s shrill diatribe, apart from his line about “revenge.”

To be sure, there were several saboteurs, and you can bet that come 2016, we’ll see a couple throw their hats in the ring. The New Jersey Windbag will likely be one of them, or he’ll be somebody’s pick for VP. Somebody from Florida, I’m betting. Meanwhile, the best and the brightest conservatives in our party have been mocked and disparaged. America is likely to be on its knees before the passage of another four years, and if so, we must admit that a positive conservative message on all fronts must carry the day going forward. We cannot win with mushy moderates. Even if at this late hour, or in the days to come, Mitt Romney’s count is somehow found to make him the winner, it will be in court until time stops. Can you imagine the infamy of it when it turns out that just like the illegitimate Senator from Minnesota, who holds his seat solely on the basis of fraud, Barack Obama turns out to have done the same?

No, our strategy must be a simple one from now until 2016: We must rebuild conservatism even if it means walking away from the Republican party, and we must fight a stalling delaying action with everything we’ve got. They own the media, the bureaucracy, the education, the executive branch, the Senate, and the judiciary. We’ve got John Boehner. Don’t tell me we’re losing the country. We’ve already lost it. Now it’s time to take it back, if we can.

There’s nothing worse than knowing what’s coming, except perhaps for the poor fools who will be taken by surprise. This country will not survive in this form. This blog certainly won’t. There may be a day in the not-distant future when I will be forced to suspend this blog for purely economic reasons. By then, I’ll probably be eating horse, rather than raising them. That’s fine. When that day comes, I’ll do what I must, but every day from now until then, I am going to fight the statists and their miserable claim to the production of others who they would enslave to their service. I am not interested in getting along. I am not interested in any more moderation. My message for the left? Andrew Breitbart said it best:

My son-in-law is getting set for deployment to Afghanistan. His departure is imminent, and while I am proud of the young man’s continuing service to this country, this being his second deployment, I am startled by the manner in which the current administration treats all our soldiers. The truth is that the Obama administration doesn’t even like the military, and except for instances in which they can be used as a campaign prop, they haven’t any regard for the men and women who volunteer to serve this nation. One Obama-friendly group has come out with its proposal for trimming military pay and benefits, and it’s shocking to realize how little regard they have for our service-members based on what they’re advocating. The Center for American Progress, a completely maniacal left-wing cohort of Obama’s, largely funded by George Soros, has actually suggested that our government should cut the pay and benefits of soldiers dramatically. It’s disgusting. It’s despicable. It’s another example of how the left doesn’t understand or appreciate our military men and women, but if Obama is re-elected, it’s probably the blueprint for what will happen. It’s time to consider the disastrous consequences of another presidential stand-down.

They’ve actually proposed cutting military retirement, and they’ve also proposed changing the rules for when one can begin drawing a military retirement. Rather than commencing retirement benefits upon retirement, the madcaps at the Center for American Progress are pushing the notion that benefits shouldn’t commence until 60. I want those of you who haven’t served in the military to think about this very carefully. If a young man or woman serves twenty years in the military, on average, it’s not like working in the civilian world for two decades. The abuses of one’s body, the toll it takes on one’s family, and the miserable conditions under which two decades of life are conducted is something for which there are no direct analogs in the civilian world. One person I know, a police officer, who works hard and is dedicated to public safety, likened his profession to the military, and I stopped and corrected him. There is a vast difference, and it comes down to this: Our service-members live under martial authority. It’s not like being a cop, much as I respect so many in that profession.

Let’s be blunt about it: If you are a police officer, and you arrive at a scene, and your Sergeant or Lieutenant tells you to carry out some ludicrous order that puts you in danger, you can refuse. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you will be fired. In garrison, or on the battlefield, a soldier really has no such discretion, because failing to follow orders can get you dead. You see, in the military, there really isn’t room for such discretion, and those who volunteer to serve have set aside the ordinary right to refuse all of us in the civilian world enjoy, in favor of the mission set forth by their commanders, but since they do not get to pick the term of their enlistments according to who is in command at the time, either nationally or locally, they simply must comply.

To get capable, smart, qualified people to do the jobs we ask our service-members to do in peacetime at their miserable rate of pay is hard enough, but multiplied and magnified by the rigors of war-fighting, and a simple existence under martial authority, we need to offer an enticement. That’s why we offer at least somewhat enticing retirement benefits, but this is also why the left, despite all their previous anti-draft protesting, is very much pro-conscription: They wish to be able to force people to serve in these conditions. Imposing the pay and benefits cuts that CAP proposes would assure that the United States would either impose a draft to fulfill its defense needs, or simply cease to defend the nation. Either is acceptable to leftists, but in truth, they’d like to have both.

Remember, if a young person 17-21 volunteers for military service, assuming they carry out a twenty year career, that means they will return to the civilian world in their late thirties or early forties, and despite the propaganda to the contrary, most will be effectively starting over. You see, very few specialties in the military actually translate directly to civilian uses. Working on artillery pieces doesn’t really translate to working on Fords. Some of the underlying skill-sets may, but the truth is that it’s not a simple transition in most cases. There aren’t really many positions for infantrymen in the civilian world. Therefore, you have a group of people transitioning into a civilian workforce who may well have delayed their higher education, and otherwise set aside those developments in order to protect us. Then, having completed two decades, they exit the military into a civilian workforce where they may be at significant disadvantage. There is discrimination against veterans in many cases, and they step into this world precisely in what ought to have been their peak earning years. The Center for American Progress thinks we should delay their retirement benefits until they’re sixty. The truth is, we should pay them upon retirement because it’s the ethical thing to do in helping them catch up, and in order to thank them for their honorable service.

I’m not going to touch the part about active military pay, lest I launch into a stream of profanities over CAP’s proposals, but I think it’s time we understand, all of us, that when we ask young men and women to serve, we’re asking that they do so in our stead. How much is that worth? As my son-in-law prepares to fly to a distant and God-forsaken land, to help a people who may not want it, and to defend them against their own, knowing that most deaths in that country are the result of our alleged allies turning on our people, I can’t help but reflect on my own military service, and all the things I saw. I wonder if the day will ever come when the American people will universally understand what it is we ask of these young people, and whether there will ever be a time when the left is willing to pay the costs of maintaining the defenses of the liberties they so blissfully enjoy in brutally indifferent ignorance. If Barack Obama is re-elected, the undue suffering of our men and women in uniform will increase dramatically. As I prepare to see my son-in-law depart on another deployment, we must take care of affairs here at home. We must prevent this.

As more facts are revealed about the events in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11th, 2012, what is becoming increasingly obvious is that President Obama not only lied to the American people about the role of the now-infamous anti-Islam video, but also systematically covered-up the entire fiasco resulting in the deaths of Americans serving at the President’s direction in Libya. The President and others in his administration are playing fast and loose with the facts, and sources now say that there were at least three requests for aid that were denied by the chain of command. This is astonishing news, because what it directly implies is that the President’s statements about his first direction being to secure Americans was a bald-faced lie. President Obama not only lied to the American people, but he and those acting at his direction abandoned Americans on the field of battle. He flew off to Las Vegas, precisely to create an alibi. The problem is, as President of the United States, the White House goes with you wherever you may be. No, there will be no alibis this time, and this President must face the music, but if he is re-elected, he will not. Any political black eye will come long after he begins his new term, if it materializes at all. I can no longer refer to him as “President” Obama. No American president has ever behaved so cravenly. Re-elect him if you like, but he will be “the Coward” on the pages of this blog, for leaving Americans to be slaughtered, some who fought valiantly to save others, giving their lives for their countrymen.

One of the lies being pushed around is that he needed to “get to the bottom of this.” That’s hogwash. We now know that there were Predator drones in the air over the scene, at least one providing a live video feed of the situation on the ground. More, we also know that the valiant Tyrone Woods – one of the Navy Seals killed in this action – maintained contact and was actually ordered to stand down in his efforts to save others before he ignored orders and ultimately gave his life in that pursuit. His father, Charles Woods, has given several interviews, but on Friday night, he gave one to Sean Hannity, and during this interview, we learn a good deal about the character of Tyrone Woods as well as the Marxist Coward. You can play the audio of the phone interview below:

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A number of the people in media are ignoring a central point about all of this, and I think it needs to be understood, because it demonstrates the absurdity of the Marxist Coward’s lies. There can be no way that Barack Obama was out of the loop. There can be no way he ever believed this was the result of protests against a video. That entire story was cooked up in the bowels of the Obama campaign. You might ask how I know this with such certainty.

The reports of Friday morning that urgent requests for assistance were denied offers the first bit of evidence. The damning bit of evidence came later in the day, when the CIA put out this statement:

“We can say with confidence that the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi. Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. In fact, it is important to remember how many lives were saved by courageous Americans who put their own safety at risk that night—and that some of those selfless Americans gave their lives in the effort to rescue their comrades.”(emphasis added)

“No one at any level in the CIA.” Notice it does not say “No one at any level.” This qualification is the damning bit. The CIA does not claim that requests for aids weren’t denied. The statement merely claims nobody in the CIA denied them. Once you realize this, it’s now a more important statement, because it doesn’t tell us who did deny such requests, but merely who did not. With that in mind, we must now ask: Who else would have the authority to deny a CIA request? The State Department doesn’t have that authority, except insofar as the request might have been made of them, but it wasn’t. They were asking for military support. That means the Department of Defense.

Those of you who have spent any time around any government operation will know that a situation or request spanning different departments and agencies of this sort will always go all the way up the chain of command, before coming back down. Unless there had been some sort of standing order to the DoD to provide support, there would have been, of necessity, a request up the chain through the CIA, landing on the desk of whom? Ultimately, there is only one office that can then take such a request and issue orders to DoD for such support. Only one. And that office and its occupant were beating feet for Las Vegas on Air Force One. Got it?

That’s right, a move like that can only happen with Presidential approval, either explicitly in advance, in the form of some blanket order, or as events unfold, in the certain terms and context of the moment. Hillary Clinton could not deny such a request. The Department of Defense couldn’t deny such a request. Only the President of the United States, in this case, the Cowardly Marxist, could deny such a request, or refuse to act on it. A President could ignore such a request until the event was over and the request mooted by the outcome, but that sort of request must pass through national command authority.

That’s right people. You want a smoking gun? You want proof that the cowardly Marxist-in-chief knew all along, and was hip-deep in this? There it is. The CIA says no one at any levelin the CIA denied such requests. They did not say that there were no such requests, or if there were, what had been the ultimate disposition of such requests. What you have here is a CIA statement intended to relieve its director of culpability. Later, it will not be said that this had been a false statement. No, the CIA is off the hook. This statement shields the CIA so long as it’s a true statement, to the degree it says anything of use. The value in this statement is what it leaves unsaid, and that is a whopper that lands in the lap of the lying Marxist coward who sporadically occupies the White House between fund-raising jaunts and Letterman appearances.

Ladies and gentlemen, the matter is clear, and the answer is simple: Either Barack Hussein Obama denied the request, or he shelved it until moot. What you have in Obama is a professional liar, and his administration is staffed with people who exist to obfuscate, shade the truth, and outright lie when necessary to fulfill their political agenda. Americans have died because of this rotten, miserable soul, and there’s a reason Tyrone Woods’ father sensed something akin to a dead fish in Obama’s handshake: Like all miserable cowards, he’s dead inside. It is time for Barack Obama to go. He has lost all valid claims to moral authority. Our country can no longer afford him, and if he remains in office, we will never know the whole truth, and no justice will be had for Tyrone Woods, a young man who acted heroically in the face of his own chain of command’s cowardice.

On Tuesday evening, Greta Van Susteren reported the astonishing but predictable news: The Obama administration knew within hours or even minutes who had perpetrated the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, ultimately killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The cover story about an anti-Islamic video was merely a scapegoat of convenience that had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on our consulate, but the sickening fact is that President Obama’s administration, including the State Department, and high level national security officials were well aware of the truth even as they continued to try to sell its cover story to the American people. The reason is simple: The Benghazi attack was the first successful strike on American soil by organized radical Islamic supremacists since September 11th, 2001, on its 11th anniversary. Fourteen days after this attack, Barack Obama was still telling the American people it was about a video, desperately hoping to disconnect the events from the obvious failures in his leadership and foreign policy. Barack Obama has deceived the American people. For seven hours, in full possession of the facts, as the attack raged and Americans were slaughtered, this President and his administration did nothing except to concoct a cover story.

Perhaps the most galling meme put forward by the Obama administration in the wake of this dismal failure was the attempt to accuse Mitt Romney of politicizing the event. The facts speak for themselves: The Obama administration commenced the politicization of this attack by lying to the American people on the basis of politically motivated calculations about the impact the truth would have on the upcoming election. Barack Obama and his administration clearly have no shame, but while they have sought to hide the truth, on Tuesday evening, emails were disclosed that should put an end to the obfuscation. From FoxNews:

The emails obtained by Fox News were sent by the State Department to a variety of national security platforms, whose addresses have been redacted, including the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon, the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence.

Fox News was told that an estimated 300 to 400 national security figures received these emails in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding. People who received these emails work directly under the nation’s top national security, military and diplomatic officials, Fox News was told.

That Candy Crowley would give Obama cover on the cover-up during the second Presidential debate is bad enough, but to now discover that the whole administration was quite well aware of the source of the attack means that we not only have a President willing to lie to the American people, but that he has surrounded himself with a cadre of bureaucratic henchmen who share his contempt for Americans. The Obama administration may be amateurish with respect to its handling of foreign policy, but they are first-rate professionals when it comes to lying to the nation. The mainstream media continues to cover and hide the lengths to which this administration has gone in its disinformation campaign against the American people.

Joe Wilson was right when he yelled at Obama during a State of the Union address: “You lie!” Worse, however, President Obama isn’t a man who once told a lie and got away with it: He is a reprobate. He is a liar by trade, and nothing he says may be trusted. Cataloging the lies of his debate appearance on Monday night would take many pages, but suffice it to say that even some in the mainstream media are having a difficult time covering his tracks.

What readers need to know about Barack Obama is this: There is no lie he won’t tell, and no American whose life and memory he will not sacrifice to his political desires. This President yammers about the politicization of a tragedy as a pre-emptive strike against the shocking truth that political calculations were and remain the motive for the cover-up of the events in Libya. Obama hopes the American people will be fooled again, and that when he says he has “kept us safe,” they will forget the deadly attack on our consulate, and the Fort Hood shooting, among other acts of terrorism he refuses to acknowledge as such. That’s all this really is, and all it’s intended to do. His entire administration is convicted of a lie, and he’s betting the American people will be too.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a serious issue, and for all of those who say it’s wrong to condemn a whole religion for the actions of a few, I may hear that argument but its weight is diminishing as the entire globe lights with the fires of violent Jihadi protests. There’s no more disguising it: The radical global Jihadi front is on the march, and it includes elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, but it also includes elements of Hamas, al Qaeda, and various other groups around the globe. In London, our embassy is seeing increasingly violent protests. In Berlin, the same thing is true. Let me explain what is happening: They are using the fraudulent claim of a Youtube video as the grounds for what they’re doing, but that’s not what those driving this have in mind. They wish to drive the US out of the Middle East, and ultimately, out of Europe, and they’re gambling that weak-kneed Europeans will be glad to comply, since they have a long history of capitulating to the Islamists who have gained increasing influence in their countries due to liberal immigration policies and ridiculous welfare programs.

They have their toe-holds in Europe, and it is now their intention to begin to take it all over. They’re not quite strong enough to do so, but what they have in mind is to create enough chaos in Europe and the US that we will withdraw entirely from the Middle East. It’s an attempt to isolate Israel, but also the United States.

This is a day of rampage for the “Religion of Peace.” This is at least partly the result of a foreign policy directed by an affirmative action Nobel Prize recipient. America is under attack. The West is under attack. It is only a matter of time until Israel comes under ferocious attack. What is President Obama doing about it?

We’ve known for some time that US foreign policy has become the instrument by which America has been ceding its interests around the globe, but what the response of President Obama and his State Department to attacks on US personnel in Libya reveals is a sickness that pervades this administration from top to bottom. We have seen administrations in the past that have failed to put America’s interests first in our global relations, but it is clear from the record that Obama’s foreign policy consists of a single maxim: “AmericaLast.” This nightmarish projection of the dreams of Obama’s father onto American foreign policy is not merely wrong-headed, or ill-conceived, but instead plainly and virulently anti-American. At every turn, Obama and his minions place the interests, the safety, and the security of the American people dead last, and the media scurries to cover it up. Examining what’s happened in Libya and around the Middle East, it is impossible to conclude that the results were accidental. The events we’re witnessing are the direct result of a policy that puts America last, at home, and around the world, and Barack Obama is that policy’s author.

On September 11th, 2012, American consulates and embassies came under attack by radical, militant Islamists. In Benghazi, our ambassador to the nation of Libya, Chris Stevens was murdered, his life poached by murderous thugs who were bent on attacking Americans on the eleventh anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/2001. Outside the consulate, the chant “Take a picture, Obama, we are all Osama,” could be heard, and while Americans were under attack, the first assumption the State Department made about the motives of the attackers was that it had been a backlash against an anti-Islamic film aimed at exposing the crimes of Islam against the Coptic Christians of Egypt.

“How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.”

These are the words of the Secretary of State of the United States of America? A few things come immediately to mind: When many responsible Americans, myself among them, warned that the so-called “Arab Spring” was a farce, we were mocked as “reactionary” and “conspiracy theorists.” When we looked on in horror as Senator McCain(R-AZ) went to Libya, and actively supported the imposition of a no fly zone in Libya, many were horrified because all the signs were present that we had climbed into bed with al Qaeda and affiliate organizations. Secretary Clinton’s advancement of the “Arab Spring” and “Democracy Movement” notions of the Obama administration are simply deplorable, and this question posed as a rhetorical device by Clinton simply serve to demonstrate the point that she should resign in disgrace.

Naturally, in her long and rambling statement, she expressed appropriate grief at out losses in Libya, but then she began the excuse-making on behalf of Libya:

“But we must be clear-eyed, even in our grief. This was an attack by a small and savage group – not the people or Government of Libya. Everywhere Chris and his team went in Libya, in a country scarred by war and tyranny, they were hailed as friends and partners. And when the attack came yesterday, Libyans stood and fought to defend our post.”

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is too busy to attend security and intelligence briefings, since he can’t miss a fund-raiser anywhere. I find it simply mind-numbing that our consular staff in Libya is left to issue a statement or that Hillary Clinton is issuing statements, while Barack Obama appears long enough to say a few words, takes no questions, and walks away. “The buck stops here” apparently doesn’t apply to President Obama, but I have some questions:

Why wasn’t a coordinated attack of some sort on the 11th of September anticipated by the Obama administration?

Why hasn’t President Obama attended all the security and intelligence briefings?

Why is this President still playing patty-cakes with the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Wing of the White House?

Rather than seeking answers to these questions, the American press has largely gone into a protective mode, giving aid and comfort to President Obama, instead going after Mitt Romney by pretending there had been some gaffe by virtue of his statements on this matter. The truth of the matter is that these had been some of the finest moments of what has been a mostly lackluster campaign by Team Romney.

Ladies and gentlemen, the United States is once again under attack, and as the acts of war against us accumulate at consulates and embassies around the globe, we need a President who is willing to take on the threats arrayed against us. Governor Sarah Palin made a strong statement on Wednesday, rebuking the intolerably useless under-reaction of the Obama administration. It’s clear that Barack Obama isn’t going to stand up for America, her interests, or even her citizens serving abroad. There’s something fundamentally broken with Barack Obama’s worldview that would permit him to continue on his current course in light of all that has happened. We have a man in the White House who is seeking to damage the country, and through his inaction in the face of mayhem and murder is abetting the enemies of America. Barack Obama should heed now his own advice to Hosni Mubarak. Speaking of Egypt, Obama said: “[the transition] must be meaningful, it must be peaceful and it must begin now.”

War is a state of conflict existing between persons, parties, nations, or the alliances made up of any of these. The object of war is to dominate one’s enemy, and to impose one’s will over them, even if one’s will is nothing more complicated than naked destruction. Carl von Clausewitz observed that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.” That being the case, it must also be true to say that politics is the means by which the hostilities of open war are concealed behind words. If all is fair in love and war, it is likewise fair in politics, and considering the radical left, at war with America for more than a century, we conservatives ought to expect that there is no scheme or connivance that exceeds their capacity for ruthlessness. In stark contrast, while they know they’re at war, many of us have innocently believed it was “just politics,” as though the object of politics had been something less destructive. History has shown us that politics is merely the extension of war, a pretty face painted on Death, and we ought to recognize its true nature.

Some won’t understand how “mere politics” can be the other side of the same philosophical coin as war. Let us refrain from the mincing of words: Politics is the means by which some people are coerced to obey the will of others. Slavery was a legal institution, created in politics, and backed-up by force. You might find that Obama-care is immoral, as do I, but in order to enforce it upon us, the government has claimed the authority to compel us to participation. When I say “compel,” I mean quite literally “force.” If you refuse, they will use the legal system to pursue you, and if you refuse to submit and surrender, they will ultimately kill you. Yes, I said “kill.” Have you any illusions about it? Do you not see that this is ultimately all government has in order to impose its dicta?

The more virulently oppressive government becomes, the more commonplace the use of coercion and force becomes. In a civilized state, the use of force is limited only to use against those who have committed wrongs, or crimes against other individuals. It is not used as an aggressive tool by which to compel others to servitude. This had been the essence of America in its earliest decades, and in those times, the left did not exist as such, and certainly did not have access to the reins of power, and yet their forerunners set up loopholes through which they would later slither. Make no mistake: The force of government is no longer an instrument of defense of the American people, but is instead the weapon of brutal invaders who use laws written against us, and for their protection. The statists of the left have captured the law, and it is the great continuation of their war against us.

People have been stunned at the rapidity with which the left and its media mouthpieces began to blame Rush Limbaugh, or the Tea Party for the shooting overnight in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. We have seen this before: It is the immediate reaction of every leftist on the planet who has access to the media in the aftermath of any human tragedy. This is another form their war takes. Their hope is to create an impression as a matter of propagandizing the audience. Brian Ross likely knew there had been a low probability of a connection between the 24-year-old shooter and the Tea Party, and he knew he would be forced to issue some form of apology, but he also knew the apology would be swept onto some obscure page on ABC’s website, long after the people who heard his earlier remarks had long gone. “Mission Accomplished!” The object of his “reporting” was the smear aimed at the Tea Party, so when a fifty-something man from Aurora Colorado heard himself being identified as the shooter, he understandably responded by disconnecting his phone to protect his own life and family. Let us hope that he retains a legal shark who will eat ABC News and Brian Ross for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but even if he does, he will face a law that will offer Brian Ross et al protection, while obstructing his pursuit of justice.

You might think that Ross had merely been anxious to scoop the story on the gunman’s identity, but while I am certain there was some element of journalistic competitiveness driving the erroneous and premature identification, the truth is that his methodology was to immediately begin surfing the Internet looking for a James or Jim Holmes related to Tea Party groups in Aurora Colorado. He found one, and when he did, he ran with it, because he saw it not only as an opportunity to get the “scoop,” but also as an opportunity to score a propaganda coup against his political opponents. What Brian Ross did was to make the innocent Jim Holmes the victim of political profiling and media malpractice. Since the left is at war with America, however, the innocent fifty-eight year-old man will be considered by Brian Ross, George Stephanopolous, and ABC News as mere collateral damage. Besides, he is a Tea Party guy, so to Hell with him. Whether there is a lawsuit, it is irrelevant to the media personalities involved: They’re at war, and in war, sometimes there will be mistaken targets, but if those mistaken targets are aligned with one’s enemies, so much the better.

This is how the left functions at all times, and they are shamelessly convinced that they must carry out the war against America without mercy. For the moment, that war is mostly one of political rhetoric and subterfuge, but conservatives should understand that their objective is no different than that of actual combat. They exist to compel and coerce you to their ends, and ultimately, if they cannot convince you to voluntarily submit, they will revert to open warfare. This is the meaning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Occupiers comprises one part of the intended army of dupes to carry out the violence if need be, even as a justification for governmental force.

Statists are not without values, although they vary dramatically from yours. Their love complies with their values quite consistently, and it is this continual devotion to purpose that drives them forward and has allowed them to win, more or less, throughout most of the last century. Even when we have won the occasional temporary victory over them, they still managed to advance the ball somewhere, somehow, in some issue upon which we had surrendered. The conservative movement has been winning a lot of battles, but it’s been losing the wider war. The institutional left has been at war with America since the late 1800s, whether or not Americans at large recognized it as such. While we’ve been trying to maintain some sort of polite debating society, the left has been planning how to undermine our constitution, the republic it had established, and the culture of independence that had made it possible.

I am going to convey something that will likely be rewarded with scorn from some quarters, but I believe that out of respect for simple, plain-spoken truth, it must be said: Due to their shocking similarities, as a result of the basic, underlying roots of their system of morality, the institutional left has become the ostensibly secular equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, or al Qaeda. You might think I’ve gone a bit daft, but I assure you that the comparison is valid in all ways. You might insist that they’re not strapping bombs to their chests, and running into crowds of infidels to their cause, but I assure you, this is only because at present, they are winning, slowly, but steadily. When Brian Ross presented the preliminary results of his “investigation” into James or Jim Holmes, he did so knowing that his information was weak, and he knew it could be damaging and destructive, but so intent upon “scoring” a victory against his political foes was he, that he strapped on the story and charged onto your television screen in order to detonate his propaganda bomb. Would he face sanctions? Probably not, but even if so, he’d be picked up by MSNBC or some other leftist outlet that is more concerned with his commitment to the cause than with his journalistic integrity.

This is the form of the war at present, but I am warning you to pay attention because it may not always be restrained to our current political warfare, and if the coin flips, you will quickly learn how committed this cabal of leftist true believers is to dominate you, and how willing to rule you by naked force they are once you scrape away the veneer of their words. Do not be deceived: We already have all the evidence necessary to convict this group of radicals as charged, only they own the courts, the law, and the power to enforce it.

The left loves power, and specifically, the power over life and death of others, but since they cannot create life, and instead can only steal it, they are consumed by the instrumentalities of death. War is death’s greatest implement, and what you had ought to recognize is that there can be no middle ground in this war. Bystanders and fence-sitters are every bit as apt to be destroyed as the participants. They pursue their objective relentlessly, and it is this consistency of effort that affords them long-term victories.

Consider it in another way, if you please: As conservatives, by and large, we are a people satisfied to live our lives by our own efforts and on our own merits, come what may. Ours is not the philosophy of coercing the innocent – people who had done no wrong – but instead the philosophy of rejecting coercion as the basis for human relations in a civilized society. Conservatives expect that amongst honest men, there may be competition without conflict in its basest form. Ours is a philosophy that generally avoids imposing coercion on others as a tool of exchange. We believe in volitional exchange from mutual strengths to mutual advantage. This is why capitalism can succeed at all, and what conservatives generally expect is that one should be left alone to his own devices so long as he is not outwardly harming others. Not quite libertarian, but close cousins to be sure, conservatives are generally willing to prohibit some actions they believe destructive of the civil society. In the main, conservatives wish to be left alone, unimpeded by the capricious desires of others, whether directly or through governments. Conservatives do not seek, in principle, to make gains by force that they could not make by the voluntary exchange with others.

The left does not admit of any restraint upon their claim to coerce others. In their view, coercion and force are merely tools used to get their way, and they use them aggressively. Leftists must always attack, because they seek to make gains from their coercion. The reason for this dramatic difference is implicit in the nature of the sort of person who is conservative, or “liberal.” Conservatives are willing to rely upon volitional exchange, because in point of fact, they most frequently have plenty to offer, and are willing to create the material value necessary for said commerce. In stark contrast, the left is not satisfied to rely upon volitional exchange, because with respect to their fellow man, they create nothing of value. If one has nothing to offer in exchange for things of value rightfully possessed by others, one has but a single alternative: Expropriation, and naked theft, with coercion as one’s means of exchange.

Leftists believe no weapon is superior to the possession of the largest and/or most ruthless mob. They are willing to substitute a club or a gun for a syllogism at the first evidence that logic and reason will fail them, and there is no rationale that exceeds in quality their estimation of the primitive consideration that condenses at long last to: “I want it.” They are takers by profession, and they will take with a gun in one hand, a smile firmly affixed to their faces, all on the basis of the premise that “might makes right.” These are the modern cavemen who would club their mates into submission, dragging them to the cave, not interested in wooing but merely in dominating others to achieve their ends.

Those who fail to recognize this deadly basis for the century-long war the left has waged on America do so at the predictable expense of their own values. The left struggled one-hundred years at least to seize control of the law, knowing that you would obey each new dictum without much resistance, because you innocently believed that this would be enough. Now, fully a century after the attack was first launched, you’ve begun to notice that their demands never end, and that there is no compromise you may make that will finally satisfy their claims. It is the perpetual motion machine of goal-lines: No matter what you surrender, and irrespective to what degree you may have already folded, they have not had their fill, because, as they predict on the basis of your past retreats, you can be prodded into yet another.

In 1994, when Hillary-care went bust with the American people, they did not cease. Before a decade would elapse, they had an allegedly conservative President enacting their programs in small segments. By the time Barack Obama signed his Affordable Care Act into law, much of the worst of socialized medicine already existed in fact. This was merely the act in completion of a strategy stretched across a century of warfare. They do no yield, and they will not surrender. There is no time in which you can expect them to simply give up as defeated and go away with their horrid ideas, no matter how many times you may tell them “no.”

What they have succeeded most of all in doing is to convince you that you will always ultimately lose, because over the long march of time, you have innocently moved from battlefield to battlefield, never noticing that these are not isolated attacks, but the full collaboration of a war waged against you on all front. You may rush to the defense of one battlement, or to the strengthening of another flank, but they continue their war always and relentlessly. At the rank-and-file level, they don’t know or care that they’re each part of a coordinated attack. Some of them even believe foolishly that they are in defense of the citadel of liberty, on all fronts but perhaps some one exceptional issue they care not to defend, and against which they may even join in the attack.

The war is real, and victory will go only to those who had recognized it as such. With the 1993 WTC bombings, we should have known. With the embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole, we should have realized this was a wider war. It shouldn’t have taken the attacks of 9/11 to wake us to this reality. In the same way, we should have known when the 16th Amendment was ratified, that this would be the opening salvo. When the New Deal came along, we should have noticed that it was a war against us all, and by the time the Great Society was proposed, the American people should have rejected it all, but we did not. Instead, we have come to accept those programs as a baseline of our existence, when we should have battled to cast them off, but weary from each engagement, defeated and demoralized, we instead took up a position in an attempt to hold the line. We have never succeeded because we have never recognized it as a war. We never charged the enemy, but always clung instead to a wilting defense.

If we are to win this war, we must recognize it as such, first and foremost, but rather than try to defend walls that have been breached already, it is time that we must consider a bold counter-offensive. The enemy(I do not use this term lightly) is already rallying for another attempt against our Second Amendment in the wake of the Aurora Colorado shooting. They take no days off, and no days at ease, and have begun already to advance legislation and regulation they’ve kept in their arsenal for decades. Rather than trying to stave off another attack on the 2nd Amendment by claiming your right to bear arms, about which they do not care, and that will not slow them, we must launch a counteroffensive. We must push for the wider extension of gun rights. Now. We must claim the moral high ground by championing the self-efficacy of arms possessed by the law-abiding in their self-defense. Rather than letting them seize the moment, as they will, we must seize it first.

Another great warrior admonished us:

“I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything, we’ll let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose, and we’re going to kick him in the ass. We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.” – George S Patton

If you wish to win the war against the statist left, you must know it as such. You must rise to fight it as such. You may not recognize it as a war, but your enemy does, and while you exchange thoughtful pleasantries, the enemy is scouting your flanks. It’s time to realize that their words are weapons of war, and we are under attack.

” All right now, you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.” – George S Patton

The most thoroughly disturbing story to appear last week was the information suggesting that the Obama administration is actively undermining Israel in its preparations to strike Iran, and disclosing its plans to the press in order to prevent them from being carried out. This story appeared in YNet News on Thursday, and it offers details about what’s at stake, but more, the treachery of the Obama administration in seeking to undermine our ally Israel in its preparations to make strikes against nuclear facilities in Iran. Apart from the fact that this is a serious leak that should result in firings, the problem is that this may be official US policy behind the scenes. My question is this: If these leaks didn’t have the official sanction of the President, what is he doing to identify the leakers?

The information leaked suggests that Israel has formed some sort of alliance with Iran’s neighbor to the North, Azerbaijan. The basic idea contained in the leaks is that Israel would launch strikes from airbases in that country, flying across the Caspian Sea in low-level sorties designed to fly under radar coverage. The serious problem lies in the fact that all of this information has done serious damage to Israel, and even to the United States, as the article details in this summary of the damage inflicted:

Iran now has a decent picture of what Israel’s and America’s intelligence communities know about Tehran’s nuclear program and defense establishment, including its aerial defenses.

The Iranians now know about the indications that would be perceived by Washington and Jerusalem as a “nuclear breakthrough”. Hence, Iran can do a better job of concealment.

The reports make it more difficult to utilize certain operational options. These options, even if not considered thus far, could have been used by the US in the future, should Iran not thwart them via diplomatic and military means.

As you can well imagine, these leaks have created a serious problem for Israel, and it effectively takes this range of strike options off the table. With the Obama administration undertaking such a program of intentional leaks, it’s hard to imagine relations could grow much cooler between the US and Israel. One of the problems I foresee in this instance is wondering what happens when Israel, that increasingly views Iran as a potential existential threat to its people, comes to see us as taking on the role of effectively aiding that threat.

These are dangerous times, and the United States has a president who seems intent upon making them more volatile. By making such information known to the press, it is likely to act to prevent an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, but the problem is that Iran may be making serious strides in the development of nuclear weapons. So armed, they would pose a serious threat to the existence of Israel, particularly since they have a leader who has promised repeatedly to immolate Israel and her people.

If this administration is serious, what it will do is investigate the leaks and bring the sources to justice because these are classified documents and assessments, and any who have access to such material ought to be limited strictly, thus making it easier to discern who is doing all the leaking. Failing even to attempt to identify the sources of the leaks is as good as an endorsement of them, and what that suggests about this administration is too terrible to contemplate.

“We’re watching what Iran does closely,” one of the U.S. sources, an intelligence officer engaged in assessing the ramifications of a prospective Israeli attack confirmed. “But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it.”

To have American officials of any description making such remarks to the press is abominable, but to see that the Obama administration is doing nothing about it gives the appearance of official sanction. This makes one wonder what the Obama administration’s actual policy is toward Israel. Whatever you may choose to call it, it doesn’t seem to fit the term “ally.”

Our country is in crisis, but at present, we have no leader emerging to save the union, and it seems there will be no Abraham Lincoln to save the nation. Barack Obama is more like his long-ago predecessor, James Buchanan, who was put in place by his party, the Democrats, to protect the institution of slavery. Obama is in that position, as his job has been to protect and grow the welfare state, and in much the same way as Buchanan, it may be a case before the Supreme Court that defines his presidency. If Barack Obama and the Democrats have their way, the Supreme Court will uphold the Affordable Care Act(Obama-care) thus defining the character and inevitable course of the nation, much as in 1857, Justice Taney’s ruling upholding slavery in the Dred Scott case set the nation on a course to civil war. The difference was that in 1857, the court held that federalism applied, and in 2012, Barack Obama’s justice department is demanding that the 10th Amendment and the entire notion of States’ rights be ignored. There may only be one way in which this issue is finally settled, and it may require war.

In 1860, the budding Republican party sought to set the question on slavery right, the abolitionists in the North propelling Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Lincoln had the distinction of overseeing the abolition of slavery, but to do so he would need to fight a war. In much the same way, if Republicans are to begin abolishing the soft slavery of the welfare state, beginning with Obama-care, they will need to elect a leader prepared to wage war in defense of a principle. After all, in 1860, the South was entrenched in the notion of keeping the institution of legal slavery, but the abolitionists knew that could not be permitted to stand. In 2012, faced with a Supreme Court case that may well decide the future of the country, we wait to see if the court will act to save the country, or fail to defend the principles enshrined in the constitution as they did in the Dred Scott case one-hundred-fifty-five years ago.

People have falsely compared Obama to Lincoln, thinking his stance on the supremacy of the central government over the states is the most pressing comparison, but this simply isn’t the case. What will save our republic now is not more government but less, and not fewer freedoms but more, and in this sense, Barack Obama has nothing in common with Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln thought that it was impossible to better the lives of some men by subjecting other men to ruin:

“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VII, “Reply to New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association” (March 21, 1864), pp. 259-260.

Clearly, Lincoln was not interested in Obama’s updated form of enslavement, and yet that is the central crisis that will confront this nation in the 2012 elections, and for some years to come. Nobody can say with certainty what will be the final tipping point, but if this nation continues apace, it will plunge into anarchy and civil war, but this time, the government is likely to be on the side of the slavers.

There is something fundamentally flawed in the thinking of those who argue that this is just the natural progression of nations, because what they argue is that Americans are neither wise enough, nor even capable of sufficient self-control to attempt to restrain intemperate desires for wealth derived from naked expropriation, but I submit this is not true, at least not yet, and that we must not permit it to become true. Once we cross that invisible plane, the ramifications will be known with little delay, as the country you had known and loved and labored to propel disappears into the fog of a war from which only savagery may emerge.

Let us not pretend that we can’t imagine what will happen in such a scenario, but let us not delude ourselves into the beautiful lie that tells us it will somehow resolve by other, less painful means. Von Clauswitz said that war is politics by another means, and I am here to tell you that politics is just the precursor to war in such a context as the one in which our nation now persists. All of the political rancor we now experience would be replaced by open warfare, at least for a time, in the scenario I am describing. That our slate of Republican candidates might not see this is disturbing enough, but that our front-runner intentionally avoids seeing it is frankly inexcusable. Of those now in the nomination fight, I think Gingrich is most apt to understand what’s at stake, because his knowledge of history may permit him to see the warning signs with a clarity the others are neither inclined nor perhaps able to see.

Gingrich has a fine understanding of the Civil War, and he certainly knows the history of the period, and how the nation arrived in that predicament. I think Gingrich also understands that our current predicament is in some ways worse, because whereas in 1861, Lincoln put the government in service of the proposition that all men were created equal, we now have a government committed to the notion that it is the job of government to compel an equality of results.

This is the nature of the grave danger we now face, and it is every bit as dangerous as 1860, but perhaps with the added danger that we now have a president who is part of the problem. Put another way, imagine that in 1861, it had been a President from the South who instead caused t he Northern delegations to Congress to walk out, and had engaged in a brutal war to compel Northern states to the “peculiar institution” that had been slavery. That’s what we now face, as Barack Obama seeks to impose his own form of slavery on the American people.

This is why I insist that this election year is not like 1980, or even 1932. This election is most like 1860, and if we don’t find a candidate with the common sense and righteous aims of Lincoln, it may have been in vain that we exercised our vote. If we are to preserve this republic, we will need leaders who are willing to wage even war in defense of individual liberty. That certainly won’t be Barack Obama, and it surely won’t be Mitt Romney, leaving us to ponder whether it is even possible to save our union once more.

On Wednesday, the story came out that Marines in Afghanistan had been disarmed for the visit of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Many were puzzled or disgusted over this, for the implications about which it speaks volumes. If the Secretary of Defense is that worried about our own troops, perhaps he should not be serving in that post. Of course, I have a feeling I understand the real reason for this policy, and it may not be about our troops, or at least not all of them. Could it be that Secretary Panetta doesn’t want to be scored as another victim of military “workplace violence,” should another Muslim soldier angry about recent events try to act out his or her anger? I offer this only half in jest, because the behavior of leadership in this case is perplexing. I don’t understand why the Marines were treated in this way, and it can hardly inspire confidence in our service-members if they are led to doubt whether they have the full trust of the chain of command.

As we know, the Obama administration has done its best to sweep Army Major Nidal Hasan’s act under the carpet by labeling it as “workplace violence” rather than as an act of terrorism, despite all of the evidence demonstrating the link between Hasan and militant Muslim extremists. I was astonished to learn about the details of Panetta’s visit, and that our own Marines were disarmed allegedly because our Afghan allies who were in attendance were likewise disarmed. As an Army veteran myself, I could see why the security details of dignitaries might have some concern, particularly in the aftermath of the incident last weekend with the soldier who went on a shooting rampage, killing sixteen Afghan civilians, but I also know that was an aberration and says nothing about the entire force.

Still, I find it incredible that the Secretary of Defense would take this view of his own military. I wonder if he was worried about another act of “workplace violence.” After all, isn’t that what the Obama administration calls it? When a lone attacker plowed through a fence and into a ditch at the airbase where Panetta was about to arrive, I would have classified it as an act of terrorism, but with Panetta being part of the military hierarchy, wouldn’t this merely be classified by the Obama administration as another act of “workplace violence?”

I wonder if the Obama administration knows how much contempt it has wrought by that classification. This sort of thing has ramifications not only for soldiers in the field, but the whole force structure’s confidence in the chain of command. Perhaps that is part of the trouble here: Being near a large military base, I’ve heard an unusual number of grumbles about the chain of command and its general temperament with respect to the military. That’s never a healthy proposition for the military, and I know the lower end of the chain of command struggles to tamp down that sort of thing. Still, I’m certain the Obama administration is conscious of the growing displeasure from some wider body of the military. The budget cuts, the ridiculous rules of engagement, and all the over-tasking our service-members now endure are adding to the strain.

I wonder if this was the idea of Panetta, or his own staff, or whether it was the product of an abundance of caution on the part of local commanders. Either way, it signifies a break-down in the long-established and traditional notion of trust between civilian leadership and the uniformed services, and I find it atrocious on all counts. I remember being visited in the field as a young soldier by dignitaries including the Secretary of the Army, John Marsh, under Ronald Reagan, and we didn’t put our weapons away. Of course, that was a different environment, or under different global conditions, but it was also a far different chain of command that viewed its fighting men and women with reverence. Unless they had real and specific concerns, this will only serve to have widened the gulf in confidence between civilian leadership and our military, and that is never a happy development for the United States, or its Armed Services.

The Obama administration is signaling that it will overstep its bounds again, this time with respect to Syria. Many in Congress were upset by President Obama’s use of military force against Libya without Congressional approval. This issue again raises questions about when this nation goes to war, what constitutes the actual making of war, and what is an effective limitation on executive authority in this respect. More pressing than this, however, may be an underlying notion put forward by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on consultation with our allies and the international community before even talking to Congress. A resolution is being offered that threatens an impeachment should President Obama step outside the bounds of his authority and fail to consult with Congress in order to gain their approval before engaging American forces.

Congressman Walter B. Jones Jr.(R-N.C.,) has introduced a resolution stating that should the president use offensive military force without prior authorization by an act of Congress, “it is the sense of Congress” that any such actions would constitute “an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.” Of course, introducing such a resolution and actually passing it, and then subsequently acting upon it are very different things. According to WND, former Congressman Tom Tancredo believes the bill was offered as a response to the following statement by Leon Panetta, now serving as Secretary of State:

“Our goal would be to seek international permission and we would … come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this, whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress – I think those are issues we would have to discuss as we decide what to do here.”

This was Panetta’s response to Senator Jeff Session(R-Al,) during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. There has long been a significant division between presidents and congresses on the use of military force, but this is an escalation of sorts, because what it admits is that the Obama administration is willing to seek permission from international bodies like the United Nations, but not willing to seek approval from Congress. That’s an absurd reversal of precedent in many respect, because the Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution provides that it shall be Congress that has the authority to declare war.

Here’s video of the exchange:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zNwOeyuG84]

Of course, what Presidents have long asserted is that not all military actions constitute a war by traditional definition, and that various military incursions do not require approval of Congress. For instance, the operational security of some strikes might be compromised if the President had to go to Congress for each relatively small action. There is a certain truth to this, but at the same time, Congress has addressed this with the War Powers Act, that virtually every President has ignored ever since it was passed. There are vigorous debates over the constitutionality of that act, but what remains certain is that when it comes to declaring war, Congress is the proper authority. Instead, the argument revolves around what constitutes a war requiring that declaration from Congress.

Congress has itself added to the confusion, by passing resolutions that “authorize the use of force” in various contexts, but they have not issued an “resolution of war” since 1941. If Congress is going to assert its authority, it has a long line of precedents it established by its own intransigence or malingering in the last seventy or so years since it last summoned the will to declare war. This has been part of the case that previous presidents have made with respect to Congressional objections in the last four or five decades.

On the other hand, if the Congress actually passes Congressman Jones’ resolution, this might signal the willingness of Congress to take a more fundamentally active role in the foreign and military affairs of the nation. While all presidents would prefer a Congress to act as rubber-stamps for their foreign and military affairs agenda, the fact is that President Obama has been governing wildly outside the norm as commander-in-chief, and his intransigence to long-standing American foreign policy interests is a sore spot in many quarters. His willingness to abandon allies, or support former enemies is a troubling development, and this may be leading Congress to finally re-examine its largely inactive role in that part of the policy arena. Here is the complete wording of the resolution:

Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a president without prior and clear authorization of an act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Whereas the cornerstone of the Republic is honoring Congress’s exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent attack against the territory of the United States, the use of offensive military force by a president without prior and clear authorization of an act of Congress violates Congress’s exclusive power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution and therefore constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.

Readers should bear in mind that any such resolution, to carry any force, would need to be approved by the House and the Senate, but that would require the resolution being brought up for a vote. That would effectively require Speaker John Boehner(R-OH) to be in favor of it, or at least willing to put it up for a vote, and I suspect this may not be the case. Boehner has long avoided controversial maneuvers simply because he wants to avoid the possible political fall-out, meaning in too many cases, he has been unwilling to do that which is right in favor of that which he can do in relative political safety. More importantly, it would have to come to a vote in the Senate, and there’s virtually no chance of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-NV) would ever permit that. This strangely means that Boehner might be willing to bring it up for a vote, since he knows it would go nowhere in the Senate. That would merely continue the trend of Congress doing nothing to sustain its own power in foreign and military affairs, and that’s what readers should expect.

When America isn’t watching closely, or the event in question appears well away from the bulk of domestic media, occasionally one of the left’s officials will slip up and show their true face. If you listen to what Democrats in Congress and in the Obama administration say about Israel, you would think they support Israel, and are fine friends of the Jewish state. The lavish oaths of friendship upon Israel, and swear they have no bigger supporter than the Democrat Party. That is, if you can believe them. Ordinarily, it’s tough to prove, but in this case, one of their own has put her big foot in her mouth, all without the help of her slick former-President husband. None other than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton has made a statement that reveals the truth about her party. Watch this short video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BpYSGfg9oU]

That’s right. In this video, when asked by somebody in the audience about the state of politics in the US, and how it is that any Muslims from around the world could trust either party, since both seem to support their enemy, Israel, Mrs. Clinton gives a stunningly honest answer. For those Americans of any persuasion who had thought the Democrats a friend of Israel, I want you to decipher her answer, because it was clearly intended to intimate a dark secret, and that is that what politicians say in public is one thing, but what they believe may be something else entirely.

Surely you understand that this confirms what I have told you about how the radical left has taken over the Democrat party, and how they now practice an institutional antisemitism that blows kisses to Jews in public, while undercutting Israel ferociously in private. They view Israel as a problem to be dealt with, and if you’re wise, you’ll realize that historically, this is far from the first time the Jews have been regarded as a “problem” to be solved. Let’s not beat around the bush about it: The left hates Israel, and it’s partly because they see a potential ally in the Muslim world, and partly because they view Israel as the obstacle to that alliance.

Just as in the Cold War, Teddy Kennedy was willing to participate in secret talks with Soviet leaders in order to undercut President Reagan, the left will makes it friends anywhere they believe will advance their agenda. Currently, they look to the Islamic world as another source of support, which is why they have linked up with militant Islamists in some cases, in the furtherance of the so-called “Arab Spring,” but also in support of the so-called “Palestineans.” What Secretary Clinton describes in her too-candid answer is the mechanism of carrying out a ruse. In public, they must continue to support Israel, for now, but in terms of our actual foreign policy, we are currently very much pro-Islam.

The hardcore left has been pushing in this direction for many years, decades in fact, and what you quickly realize is that they have merely transformed their animosity. These same America-hating leftists have simply identified Israel as a domino that must fall in order to finally vanquish America. Once they realized this, it was only a matter of time until they began to form strategic alliances with a militant Islam that views Israel as the Lesser Satan and America as the Great one. I read an interesting posting on Tammy Bruce’s site by a guest contributor named Shifra, self-described as a Jew who discovered the universe of leftists’ rage against Israel.

While I’m not Jewish, it comports well with my own knowledge and observations, but more importantly, it reveals how the American left has slowly adopted positions that are now not only antagonistic toward Israel, but hostile to Jewry in general. For this reason, the only reason I am surprised about Hillary Clinton’s remark is that she would leave that implication hanging so publicly. The institutional left, of which Hillary is the queen bee, with her Soros-funded career, and her Soros-funded boss, is armed to the teeth with a rage she dare not exhibit. She can only make not-so-subtle intimations in public, but what is hidden behind the facial expression is the coldly-calculated leftist who knows what expressions in public are too much, and will hurt the cause. Hillary walked all over that line here, but you should view it as an opportunity to demonstrate the point.

According to the WND article, the Iranians are preparing to make attacks on US air assets. Such a strike would be more likely than most Americans think to disrupt our ability to respond to threats in the region:

The Guards’ publication Mashregh, in a warning to America, revealed a detailed plan to attack U.S. bases in the region, including, in Kuwait, two air bases, Ali Al Salem and Ahmed Al Jaber, and the U.S. military camps of Buehring, Spearhead, Patriot and Arifjan. Also targeted are U.S. air bases in Afghanistan, the super U.S. base Al Adid in Qatar, its other super base at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and Thumrait Air Base in Oman.

Such an attack could certainly cause chaos, or worse, but it would almost certainly send the US scrambling, and it might open a window of opportunity for the Iranians to make good on their promise to close off the Straits of Hormuz, at least for a while. That might be enough to hamper our logistical chain, making it difficult to carry on war-fighting operations. At the same time, the Iranians have armed a number of small, fast boats with explosive warheads that would be delivered by ramming in suicide attacks:

The Guards have also armed hundreds of speed boats with high explosives for suicide attacks against U.S. Navy assets and the shipping traffic in the Gulf. Sources within the Guards also reveal that the Guards have been training pilots for suicide attacks against U.S. assets in the Gulf by using smaller planes loaded with explosives.

Rational? I wouldn’t have considered the Japanese all that rational in 1944-45 as their young pilots rammed aircraft into our warships in Kamikaze attacks, yet this is the same sort of mindset we now face. We’re in particularly bad shape, because just as this threat is rising, our military is undergoing vast cuts, and we have poor national leadership across the board. Barack Obama has shown no willingness to take on the Iranians, but we know he’s capable of making apologies. This president is so unwilling to defend America against its enemies that there really is no precedent in American history. If Iran’s leadership decides it’s willing to wage a war in order to protect its nuclear weapons program, they may win. If you think the Ayatollahs are irrational, what must we conclude about the man Rush Limbaugh has called “Imam Obama,” who now leads our country into a blind alley? How rational is Obama? For our country, the prospects are too frightening to consider.